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THE REAL COLLEGE 



THE REAL COLLEGE 



GUY POTTER ^ENTON 

President of Miami University 



One of the Memorial Volumes issued in 
connection with the exercises attendant 
upon the celebration of the one hundredth 
anniversary of the founding of the Miami 
UniversitD—A REAL COLLEGE. 



Cincinnati: Jennings and Graham 
New York: Eaton and Mains 






Copyright, 1909. 
By Jennings and Graham 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two CoDies Received 

JUN to liiUS 

t.,. Cocyrurnt Enttv, ^ 
CL/gS A XXc No, 

^ COPY- B, 



Who has never lost faith in her son, and 
whose heroic sacrifices and persistent ambi- 
tion for him have made it possible for him to 
breathe, for twenti^-five ]^ears, as student and 
teacher, the atmosphere of The Real College, 



PREFACE 



The Place of the Small College, The Mission 
of the Small College, and kindred topics, are 
among the most prominent and frequent on the 
programs of latter-dag college associations and 
educational conventions. 

There is no place or mission for the " small" 
college. Ours is a day of big things. The ad- 
jective small used to qualifi) anything is suggest- 
ive of insignificance and begets contempt An 
educational institution may be large in financial 
resources and equipment and great in the lofty 
purpose of its existence, but because it is, by 
choice, limited in the size of its student body 
alone, it is wrongly called small. It is to correct 
this persisting misconception that this little volume 
is given to the Public. 

It is worth while to distinguish clearly the 
efficient from the inefficient. The Real College is 
never a small college. The small college is never 
a Real College. Years of experience and ob- 
servation have convinced the writer that the insti- 

7 



PEEFACE 

tation small in enrollment mai; be truli; great, and 
that a large attendance may be registered in an 
exceedingly small institution. First of all, then, 
a definition of the Real College is attempted. 
After that the president of the Real College, the 
students of the Real College, and the faculty of 
the Real College are studied in the order named. 
Last of all, a picture of The Real College Man is 
attempted. 

If, in this Centennial year of the founding of a 
Real College, so small a memorial book shall, in 
any way, quicken in its readers their appreciation 
of the worth of the Real College, the object of its 
author's labor of love will have been accom- 
plished g^Y POTTER BENTON. 

Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, 
The First of June, Nine- 
teen Hundred and 
Nine. 



THE REAL COLLEGE DEFINED 



THE REAL COLLEGE DEFINED 

Precedent is sacred in England. In 
America it is a convenience. A Court de- 
cision is accepted by us as binding so long 
as it supports our contention or until it runs 
contrary to our wishes and we convince a 
succeeding Court of its fallacy. If tradi- 
tion in the New World but bore the seal of 
value it wears across the seas, we had never 
been so hopelessly lost in our attempt to 
find proper definitions for the names ap- 
plied to our various educational institutions. 
In the British Isles, and on the Continent, 
the use of the word ^^ college" is so univer- 
sally accepted as meaning but one thing that 
it is at once clearly differentiated from the 
university, which every one understands to 
be an institution of another class. In this 
country we use college, academy, seminary, 
and university as satisfactory synonyms with 
such profane disregard for the customs of 
the centuries that, after an institution has 

11 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

been given its name, several explanatory 
sentences inevitably follow to make plain the 
field of intellectual endeavor it is supposed 
to cover. In every State of the Union we 
have had institutions with but one little build- 
ing, a half-dozen teachers, a half-hundred 
students, a diminutive library, and a paucity 
of apparatus, each wearing the name of uni- 
versity as its proud corporate right. On the 
other hand there are numerous institutions 
bearing unpretentiously the name of college, 
which, in consideration of the scope and va- 
riety of work covered, belong, by right, to 
the university class. 

It would be unfair to condemn too 
strongly those founders of institutions who 
have taken this liberty with terms of estab- 
lished meaning. Our country is new, and, 
coincident with the beginnings of the State, 
came the founding of educational institu- 
tions. We are a people of large expecta- 
tions, and a sanely optimistic view of future 
possibilities has often seemed to warrant the 
hope that an institution of learning about to 
be planted would ultimately become, in the 

12 



THE EEAL COLLEGE DEFINED 

proper and fullest meaning of the word, a 
university. In some instances the hope has 
been fulfilled in accomplishment. In nu- 
merous other instances later generations have 
realized that their forefathers had laid insti- 
tutional foundations in a fabric of dreams 
which in the light of after developments 
could not possibly find a superstructure of 
substance. 

Here and there in our history have been 
found conservatives who have laid in mod- 
esty the foundations of a college. That cir- 
cumstances they were unable to foresee have 
pushed their college forward into the larger 
proportions of a university is not to be 
charged against them as due to narrow- 
mindedness or shortsightedness. Without 
the gift of prophecy it were impossible, in a 
developing civilization, to predict with cer- 
tainty the magnitude an institution would 
assume. Often has the small planting be- 
come the large fruition. 

All things considered, it would hardly be 
wise, at this time, to yield to the demand 
coming from many quarters for change of 

13 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

titles. It is an easy matter to broaden the 
name of college into the more appropriate 
one of nniversity. It is almost impossible 
to compress the name nniversity, long worn 
by an institution, into that of college. To 
attempt to rename all the educational insti- 
tutions of the land so that each shall be 
known for what it is by the appellation it 
bears, would be an undertaking beset with 
many just objections. When graduates of the 
years come back, at convenient seasons, and 
when they assemble in alumni gatherings, 
they are happy in taking on their lips the 
name of Alma Mater that became precious 
during the care-free period of student life. 
Why break the heartstrings of thousands of 
college folk by substituting a strange title 
for one that has become sacred through years 
of the sweetest associations the earth holds? 
Then, too, it may afterwhile be necessary 
to change back again. If the past may be 
accepted in any way as a gauge for the fu- 
ture, the institution that is small and insig- 
nificant to-day may become large and in- 
fluential to-morrow. Let the institutions 

14 



THE EEAL COLLEGE DEFINED 

called colleges, if development warrant it, 
change their names to university, but let 
those colleges which in human unwisdom 
have been called university retain the title 
to the comfort of alumni while they hope for 
a greater to-morrow — only, though granting 
this, let us determine the distinction between 
the university and the college regardless of 
the name borne, if perchance we may re- 
alize in America the advantages that are to 
be found only in The Real College. 

A careful study of the origin of institu- 
tions of higher learning will reveal the fact 
that, in the very beginning of its existence, 
the university was an institution for ad- 
vanced study. Charles the Great, ignorant, 
but eager for learning, is entitled to the 
gratitude of the generations as the inspired 
originator of higher education. This mighty 
founder of empire has sent a succession of 
distinguished teachers down from the day 
of Alcuin, for in the great abbey schoolroom 
of St. Martin, at Tours, is found the nucleus 
of the teaching from which the university 
took its rise. 

15 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

As an institution organized and tangible, 
the university in the earliest stage of its de- 
velopment was simply a scholastic guild or 
group of scholars and teachers bound to- 
gether like a trades-guild for the purpose of 
investigating the more intricate intellectual 
and spiritual problems. The purpose of the 
founding of the University of Salerno, the 
first in Europe, confirms the statement that 
the university was an institution for the ad- 
vanced work of masters, and not for the 
making of bachelors. It existed in the first 
place as a School of Medicine. Like Salerno, 
all the earlier universities found their origin 
to a great extent in endeavors to obtain and 
provide instruction of a kind beyond the 
range of the monastic and cathedral schools. 
It is clear, therefore, that precedent makes 
the university an institution for the advanced 
research and investigations of graduate stu- 
dents. It is true that a multiplication of in- 
dependent colleges united in a community 
with a centralized government in certain 
agreed matters, as at Cambridge and Ox- 
ford, has somewhat modified the original 

16 



THE EEAL COLLEGE DEFINED 

European conception of a university. Not- 
withstanding this modification the university 
remains, in the essential purpose of its ex- 
istence, an institution for advanced graduate, 
technical, or professional study. This ideal 
of the purpose of the university has been 
taking root in America in recent years. 
Though there are those in high educational 
places who demand a process of exclusion, 
there are others equally prominent who de- 
mand an all-inclusiveness of the educational 
endeavor in order that we may realize, on 
the new Continent, the perfect university of 
the world. 

At the annual meeting of the National 
Association of State University Presidents, 
at Baton Eouge, Louisiana, in November, 
1906, President George E. MacLean, of 
the State University of Iowa, as chair- 
man of a committee appointed at a pre- 
vious meeting to present a definition of 
a university for interpretation of member- 
ship rights in the Association, and to fur- 
nish an ideal to which all universities should 
aspire, announced that he had been unable 
2 17 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

to secure an agreement with his colleagues 
on the committee, the Presidents of the Uni- 
versities of Illinois and Vermont. Despair- 
ing of any concert of action by the members 
of the committee, he presented as his own 
conception of the character of institution 
necessary for recognition by the National 
Association of State Universities the follow- 
ing statement : 

^^ Without attempting definitions, we be- 
lieve that while a university may be, in the 
words of a distinguished member of this 
Committee, 'a complex of colleges,' it is 
essentially much more than that. It should 
give a liberal education and prepare practi- 
tioners for the various professions, but its 
keynote, in addition to the liberalization of 
the mind, must be the spirit of specializa- 
tion, research, and discovery of new truths 
and new applications of old truths, and the 
diffusion of knowledge, particularly in the 
institutions we represent, in the service of 
the State and Nation. 

In gross, therefore, we recommend as 
standards at this date, for an institution to 
be recommended as a standard American 
university : 

18 



THE EEAL COLLEGE DEFINED 

1. A university giving the Degree of 
Doctor of Philosophy or Doctor of Science, 
after three years of graduate study in resi- 
dence, one of which shall be at the institu- 
tion conferring the degree ; 

2. A university that requires, in addition 
to the points named in graduate study, that 
a candidate before receiving his higher de- 
gree shall have completed for his Bachelor's 
Degree a course of not less than one hun- 
dred and twenty semester hours in subjects 
distributed with reasonable sequences, and 
preliminary requirements among the great 
groups of subjects, ordinarily recognized in 
the field of liberal arts, as languages and 
literature, philosophical and historical sci- 
ences, material sciences and the fine arts. ' ' 

President Edmund Janes James, of the 
University of Illinois, the only other mem- 
ber of the committee present took issue with 
President MacLean, contending that in this 
progressive day the universities were grow- 
ing too rapidly, and to serve the larger in- 
terests expected of a university they must, 
in the near future, be relieved by the high 
schools and small colleges of at least the 
first two years of the college course. If 

19 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

President James is right — and there are 
many who share his views — it would seem 
that we are likely in the United States, be- 
fore long, to be driven back to a realization 
of the original European conception of the 
university. 

A university may continue to maintain 
one or more undergraduate colleges, but 
even now it is generally admitted that the 
prime object of its existence is to serve so- 
ciety by solving the larger problems, the an- 
swers to which are essential to the welfare 
of humankind. It is certain that increasing 
demand for skilled labor and trained experts 
will compel the university of the future to 
assume this character. 

The day is past when a man can engage 
in a commercial career without a thorough 
knowledge of the scientific principles upon 
which all sound business achie%^ement must 
rest. The Tuck School of Finance, at Dart- 
mouth College — and by the way, Dartmouth 
is one of the so-called colleges which on ac- 
count of the number of students and the scope 
of its work now fairly belongs to the univer- 

20 



THE EEAL COLLEGE DEFINED 

sity class — the Wharton School of Commerce 
at the University of Pennsylvania, and the 
School of Commerce at the University of 
Wisconsin, are a response to the modern de- 
mand for trained men of affairs and are 
augury of a not far distant day when all 
universities will have Graduate Schools of 
Business, taking equal rank with Schools of 
Law, Medicine, Theology, and Engineering. 
Clearly, then, there must be an institution 
that will carry youth-hood forward from the 
work completed in the high school to the 
point of maturity and knowledge which will 
find him prepared for the specialization of 
the graduate college in the university. 

The institution which fills this gap is the 
college, and that it has been a most impor- 
tant institution in our educational system is 
evidenced by past accomplishment in the 
production of men and women of cultured 
lives and effective service. It will continue 
to be an indispensable feature of our edu- 
cational work so long as the humanities are 
of interest to men and so long as a good 
foimdation is a recognized necessity for a 

21 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

superstructure of specialization. Only a few 
years ago tlie friends of the American col- 
lege were panic-stricken by the fear that the 
institution of their affection was about to 
be obliterated. The greatest college presi- 
dent in the country inaugurated the move- 
ment for the abolition of the time-honored 
four-year college course and the substitution 
therefor of a three-years^ course, including, 
however, as much work as had previously 
been done in four years. Not to be outdone 
in progressive theories of education, a prom- 
inent metropolitan university president in 
the East soon followed by insisting that a 
two-years' course between the high school 
and the professional school of the university 
was sufficient. Following hard on the heels 
of this declaration came a pronunciamento 
from the distinguished president of a metro- 
politan university in the Middle West de- 
manding that two years be added to the four- 
year courses now given in the average public 
high school. Is it any wonder, in the light 
of these proclamations emanating from rec- 
ognized authorities in higher education, that 

22 



THE EEAL COLLEGE DEFINED 

the friends of the college became apprehen- 
sive? The institution of their love seemed 
marching to a certain doom. 

The college still lives, however, and if it 
is ever changed in character the change is 
more likely to occur on the lines suggested 
by President James than otherwise. The 
high schools may become colleges in the 
scope of their work in some future day, and 
if that day arrives it will come bringing the 
same problems that now confront the col- 
leges. Undergraduate colleges may continue, 
doubtless will continue indefinitely, as at- 
tached features of a university system, and 
the college existing in the university has 
many of the same problems to solve which 
belong to the college in detachment. 

A college, as an advanced grade of the 
high school or as an inferior department of 
a university, will always, by reason of the 
age or stage of maturity of its students and 
the character of its work, have a distinct 
quality calling for the observance of par- 
ticular forms and the realization of certain 
ideals therein. 

23 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

It is because of the fact that years of 
existence have established traditions and 
customs found only in isolation, that we shall 
assume for our present purpose that the in- 
dependent institution performing the func- 
tions required between the high school and 
the university, whether it be properly called 
college, or miscalled university, is the type 
of the real college. 

The real college is not an academy, 
neither is it a graduate or professional 
school. It need hardly be said that a school 
for the teaching of Bookkeeping, Banking, 
Commercial Forms, and Stenography, guar- 
anteeing a completed course and fitness for 
a good-salaried position after six months of 
training, though often bearing the preten- 
tious name of college, is not a college. A 
technical school, giving undergraduate work 
in Mechanics, Engineering, Ceramics, or the 
Applied Sciences, even though it offer strong 
and thoroughly useful courses extending 
through a number of years, is not, accord- 
ing to the accepted conception, a college. 
The real college bridges the chasm between 

24 



THE REAL COLLEGE DEFINED 

the high school or academy and the uni- 
versity or professional school. Its mis- 
sion is not to prepare directly for business 
or profession. It does prepare for life. It 
presents the humanities. It introduces the 
student to Philosophy and Literature, and 
grounds him in Linguistics and the Pure 
Sciences. The real college drills the stu- 
dent in subjects that he may never use in 
his life's vocation. It may grant the privi- 
lege of electing certain studies that look to- 
ward a particular calling in later years ; but 
these studies are, at best, only a basis for 
the practical studies that are later to follow 
them. 

The college is a foundation builder. It 
seeks to establish the youth in body, intel- 
lect, and moral character so strongly that he 
will be well prepared in due season, with 
large vision and lofty ideals, for the suc- 
cessful undertaking of special training. The 
real college is a school of discipline and cul- 
ture. The men and women of America who 
have lived the larger life, who have won the 
greater success, and who have rendered the 

25 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

better service as a result of the ideals, dis- 
cipline, and culture of the undergraduate pe- 
riod, are satisfactory proofs that their time 
was not misspent, and they abundantly vin- 
dicate the importance to civilization of the 
real college. 



26 



THE PRESIDENT OF THE REAL 
COLLEGE 



THE PRESIDENT OF THE REAL 
COLLEGE 

The Man at the Wheel is indispensable. 
To attempt to direct an educational institu- 
tion without a capable head is as an attempt 
to run a ship without a pilot. The Univer- 
sity of Virginia tried it for seventy years 
and more, and then acknowledged that the 
prolonged experiment was unsatisfactory. 
The University of Cincinnati reached the 
same conclusion much earlier in its history. 

It was in deference to the expressed wish 
of Thomas Jefferson, the founder, for an 
academic community thoroughly democratic 
that the University of Virginia adopted the 
policy of handing the executive business 
about in rotation from year to year to a fac- 
ulty chairman. By directing inquiries to 
those connected with the institution just 
named, persons interested may easily secure 
decided opinions on the practical workings of 

29 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

this plan. The fact, though, that the Univer- 
sity of Virginia now has a president as its 
permanent head is doubtless the best evidence 
that the original policy was found unsatisfac- 
tory. We are warranted, too, now that the 
University of Cincinnati boasts a president, in 
drawing similar conclusions concerning that 
institution. Other colleges have tried the ex- 
periment of a headless directing body and 
have sooner or later pronounced the plan im- 
practical. There is universal acknowledg- 
ment of the need of a managing head for 
every enterprise of importance. The real 
college is an important enterprise. Such a 
college must have a responsible head. He 
may be called chancellor, governor, master, 
director, or president. The name does not 
alter the main requirements of the position. 
In America the executive and administrative 
head of the college commonly answers to 
the title of president. 

The president of the real college is a per- 
son of manifold duties. His obligations are 
varied. He sustains relations to the gen- 
eral public, to his board of trustees, to his 

30 



PRESIDENT OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

faculty, to his alnmni, to his patrons, and, 
most vital of all, to his students. 

The college president of the middle nine- 
teenth century had a well-beaten path lead- 
ing from his study to his classroom. He be- 
longed to the college alone. The public had 
no claims upon him. Not so to-day. One 
of the most eloquent orators of the South 
less than five years ago declared that his 
life, while generally regarded as successful, 
was to him in a measure a disappointment. 
It was a matter of regret to him, he said, 
that he could not have been a college presi- 
dent, so that he might have lived a life of 
literary ease with the books of his library, 
unvexed by the harassing anxieties of the 
busy outside world. The college president 
who listened to this expressed conception of 
his care-free existence smiled sadly as he 
thought of the great gulf that lay fixed be- 
tween the ideal and the real. In delivering 
the charge to his successor at the Prince- 
ton installation ceremonies in October, 1902, 
President Patton said, in substance, to Pres- 
ident-elect Wilson: ^^It may be pleasant, in 

^1 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

your new position, to recall that yon once 
had the tastes and inclinations of a scholar, 
but it will be only a recollection.'' No edu- 
cational institution in our day can long sus- 
tain itself unless its claims are unceasingly 
pressed upon the public. The college serves 
its students first, of course, but it is re- 
stricted to the point of approximate ineffi- 
ciency if its service ends there. The college 
has not done half its work unless it carries its 
ideals away out beyond college halls — unless 
it lends itself to the solution of the great 
problems of humanity. The real college 
should serve Society, Church, and State, 
and the college president must project the 
influence of his institution as far as may be 
out into the practical affairs of men. 

The college, to grow and to serve hu- 
manity, with a constantly increasing effec- 
tiveness, must have money, and money never 
comes without the asking. The college pres- 
ident must know how to ask in such a way 
that he will receive. One of his chiefest 
duties, in relation to the public, is that of 
a money-getter. If the institution is sup- 

32 



PEESIDENT OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

ported by the State, he must needs be skilled 
in the art of approaching leglislators in the 
way that will most surely bring ample ap- 
propriations for buildings, improvements, 
and maintenance. In this work, happy 
would the college be, and happier its presi- 
dent, if he could be relieved from the re- 
sponsibility of pressing its claims. It is un- 
seemly for one charged with the dignity of 
educational administration to appear in the 
role of a lobbyist, as a suppliant, knock- 
ing at the doors of legislative halls. If 
trustees would assume the duty of secur- 
ing the appropriations for the support of 
our State colleges and universities, the pub- 
lic would be spared the spectacle of edu- 
cators mingling with clamorous sycophants, 
and the presidents of these institutions 
would be spared the humiliation of a dis- 
credited classification. Trustees, however, 
are usually active business or professional 
men and can promise little more than sup- 
port, while they look to their president to 
see to it that the legislature supplies insti- 
tutional needs. If the president fails in this 
3 33 



THE EEAL COLLEaE 

work he is nsually regarded as a general 
failure. Excellence in other lines will not 
compensate for lack of ability to secure the 
needed financial support. The best that can 
be done under present conditions, in all the 
effort necessary to get money, is for the 
president to maintain a bearing in harmony 
with the exalted work of one charged with 
a right example to youthhood. Legislators 
respect the man who does not forget the ob- 
ligations of his calling. They do not want 
educators to descend to the level of the pro- 
fessional lobbyist. The college president 
who tries to play the politician by being a 
good fellow may win favor with the few, but 
with the majority he meets the failure that 
contempt always presents to its object. To 
drink and smoke and entertain lavishly may 
not be considered inappropriate when it is 
done by a railroad attorney seeking favor- 
able legislation, but any such conduct is al- 
most universally recognized as an incongru- 
ity when used by a college president to win 
favor. As the majority of our American law- 
makers are men of sturdy common-sense and 

34 



PEESIDENT OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

high ideals of character, they have little re- 
spect for an exemplar who does not every- 
where exemplify. It is argument — facts at- 
tractively presented — that wins legislative 
support for colleges. The president of a 
State college who knows how to approach 
men skillfully but honestly, and who believes 
in his cause, will find a sympathetic response 
from the friends of public education in legis- 
lative halls. 

The president of a Church college who 
succeeds is a professional beggar. To allow 
any fine conception of modesty to restrain 
him from asking any living person for money 
would be to spell out for him the words of 
his own failure in the service he should ren- 
der his institution. For the executive of a 
Church-supported institution there is no sur- 
cease of toil from the morning of the day of 
his installation to the evening of his effective 
resignation. He must have well in hand the 
details of institutional work, he must be con- 
stant in the service of his students and fac- 
ulty, while he seizes every possible odd mo- 
ment to make personal solicitation for build- 

35 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

ing and endowment funds. His crowded 
week-days are crowned by Sabbaths that 
know no rest, for educational sermons and 
lectures in every possible pulpit are an in- 
dispensable preliminary to generous educa- 
tional collections. 

In the matter of securing added financial 
support the president of a non-sectarian in- 
stitution maintained on private endowments 
bears the same responsibility that rests upon 
the shoulders of his brother executive in the 
Church college. The commercialization of 
the college presidency is one of the lament- 
able facts of latter-day academic policy. 

It is notorious that trustee boards of cer- 
tain institutions in recent years have made 
scholarship, literary influence, and command- 
ing character secondary considerations, and 
in the last analysis their choice of a college 
president has been governed by his ability to 
control a financial following. 

High-minded people who would not think 
of disparaging the particular qualities neces- 
sary for a bank president, a corporation man- 
ager, or a railroad director, must be par- 

36 



PEESIDENT OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

doned if they dare to believe that certain ad- 
ditional talents and attainments are requi- 
site to the realization of the true college 
president. Sad the day for the student 
when, looking for a lofty ideal, he finds in 
the president of his college nothing better 
than expert ability to multiply shekels. The 
young person fronting the future has a right 
to expect that somewhere ahead the hidden 
years have in their keeping a gift more 
priceless than material treasure. Buoyant 
youth will be incited to loftiest endeavor only 
under the inspiring charm of a big mind and 
a great heart. 

The president of the real college will un- 
derstand, if his institution is to hold a re- 
spectable position in the republic of letters, 
that he has resting upon him an obligation 
for authorship. To write poorly for the 
public prints would be to reflect discredit 
upon the interests with which he has con- 
nection. To write on lines of scientific spe- 
cialization with which he is not immediately 
connected, or to attempt to treat those sub- 
jects in which his knowledge is not fresh, 

37 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

would be exhibition of a vain presumption 
that even his position could not excuse. The 
real college president is ever pursued by the 
fear that administrative duties will rob him 
of scholarly tastes and reputation, and to 
avoid this fate he hastens, in some instances, 
to repel it by discussing questions with which 
he has not, and is not expected to have, ac- 
quaintance. 

Presidential duties undoubtedly will re- 
quire abandonment of reading and research 
on the special lines that absorb the interest 
of the professor in the college chair. It 
ought to be recognized, however, that admin- 
istration is a line of specialization as emi- 
nently respectable as Philosophy or Eco- 
nomics or Chemistry or Mathematics or Lin- 
guistics. The college president who devotes 
himself with the scholar's interest to the 
study of curricula, to problems of organiza- 
tion and government, and to the develop- 
ment of plans for effective institutional 
service, will be able to write as an author- 
ity, and his deliverances will be accepted as 
the product of scholarship. 

38 



PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

The real college president, though, will 
not have met, to the full, the requirements 
of his station when he has done his best as 
financier and author. His obligation of office 
demands that he carry the influence of his 
institution as far as possible by word of 
mouth. The day of enchanting eloquence 
and persuasive argument is not past. Occa- 
sionally it is said, and usually by those who 
are not effective in public utterance, that the 
multiplicity of newspapers and magazines in 
our modern day has made the platform ob- 
solete. It is repeatedly averred that the or- 
ator is no longer a potent factor in the de- 
liberations of men. Doubtless it is true that 
the man endowed with gifts of tongues shares 
the privilege of molding thought with other 
forces, as he did not do when Demosthenes 
hurled his phillipics and Cicero convicted by 
the force of his relentless logic. The other 
thing, though, is also true, namely, that so 
long as a warm personality has attractive 
power, that long will the word spoken by 
the living man wield an influence beyond 
that of the lifeless composition. The after- 

39 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

dinner speaker was never more in demand 
than to-day, and the applause given to his 
utterances and the editorial comment upon 
his ideas are proof sufficient that his speech 
arouses thought. Political campaigns have 
not yet found a satisfactory substitute for 
the stump. The brief does not reach the 
jury as effectively as the oral pleadings of 
the attorney. Hundreds find their way with 
the returning Sabbaths to the churches where 
gifted preachers proclaim God's everlastings 
truth, and the galleries of congressional 
halls will not begin to contain the multitudes 
anxious to hear the representatives of the 
people on living questions. It is as an ef- 
fective public speaker that the college pres- 
ident can do great service for his institu- 
tion. If the strength of his personality is 
made apparent through his spoken words in 
pulpit, in club, on platform, or in banquet- 
hall, parents find themselves longing to have 
their children under his influence, and he 
touches an hundred responsive chords that 
will become vibrant with praise for his 
college. 

40 



PEESIDENT OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

A reputation is of little value to a col- 
lege president. It may attract an initial 
crowd, but it is valueless unless its possessor 
wins the crowd. Men in some vocations can 
afford an occasional, partial, or complete 
failure in a public effort. The college presi- 
dent must never fail. As a rule his every 
appearance is before a new company, and 
his institution is, in his attitudes and every 
word, always on trial. To do poorly is 
not only to hurt himself, but, through him- 
self, to do injury to all those interests for 
which he stands sponsor. If, then, he is to 
be a fit representative of the spirit of the in- 
stitution in the service it renders to the pub- 
lic beyond his college halls, his obligation for 
close study and serious thinking is heavy in- 
deed. To assume that preparation is unnec- 
essary for even one public duty would be to 
entertain a delusion fraught with possibili- 
ties fatal to his sacred trust. 

After all, though, it is well to bear in 
mind that the duty the president of the 
real college bears to the outside world is, 
at most, only adventitious. If it were not 

41 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

for his position at home he would have none 
of these incidental functions away from 
home. It is therefore of the highest impor- 
tance that he have a proper conception of 
his part at the center from whence reach out 
all his possibilities of service. He has first 
an executive obligation to his board of trus- 
tees. If this body has been moved by the 
highest academic ideals in electing a presi- 
dent, his board will expect him to be their 
capable adviser in all that has to do with in- 
stitutional welfare. When trustees gather 
once or twice a year, for a day or two, or 
maybe for a few brief hours, dropping for 
the time all thought of their multitudinous 
business or professional cares to consider 
the well-being of their college, they have a 
right to expect that their president will have 
its affairs so well in hand that they may 
readily understand the exact uses to which 
the resources have been put, so that they 
may be intelligently and willingly led to an 
approval of his larger future plans. When 
trustees commence to entertain doubts as to 
the well-balanced judgment or the clear- 

42 



PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

seeing vision of their executive and coun- 
selor, the beginning of the end of his use- 
fulness in that relationship will have come. 
Time was when boards of trustees not 
only chose the president and faculty of the 
college, but as well prescribed the curricu- 
lum and adopted the text-books. That day 
has some time since passed into history. It 
was almost pathetic at a recent Commence- 
ment of one of our ancient and honorable 
institutions to hear a good trustee lament- 
ing that the committee on course of study, 
of which he was chairman, had had nothing 
to do in recent years. He was a good man, 
but his work as trustee had begun when col- 
lege presidents and professors were only 
hirelings. He had not awakened to a reali- 
zation of the new order of things which rec- 
ognizes that curricula and college govern- 
ment in general are the products of experts. 
Neither had he realized that certain com- 
mittees exist only to give appointments to 
members not otherwise provided for, and 
that others are perpetuated, like the snuff- 
box in the United States Senate, as a cour- 

43 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

teous tribute to the barbarous times which 
once were but are no more. 

He did not know that no self-respecting 
college president in the new age would sub- 
mit for one moment to the suggestion that 
matters purely academic should be taken 
from his faculty of trained experts and com- 
mitted to his board of trustees efficient in 
business policies but thoroughly unfamiliar 
with modern college standards. We do not 
want in America the conservative tyranny 
of the Oxford congregation. "When the con- 
vocation, which is composed of representa- 
tives of the various colleges of Oxford Uni- 
versity and which constitutes the governing 
body of the larger institution, resolved to fol- 
low the lead of American colleges in making 
Greek an elective study, the congregation, 
composed of all the doctors and masters of 
the university, many of whom are curates, 
vicars, and professionals, so far removed 
from modern academic thought that they 
might almost as well belong to the class that 
is without a diploma, exercised its guaran- 
teed prerogative of veto, from which there 

44 



PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

is no appeal, and Greek remains compulsory 
at Oxford. Even these, who believe in the 
indispensable culture value of Greek, and 
they are many, deplore the arbitrary exer- 
cise of an authority that is out of harmony 
with modern ideas of college direction. 

The writer was interested recently in 
poring over the well-written Minutes of one 
of the oldest and best of our American col- 
leges. As late as 1870 he read that the board 
of trustees was called to order, and after 
prayer that a committee was appointed to 
notify the president of the institution that 
the board was in session and ready to hear 
any communication he might have to make. 
^^In due season the committee re-appeared, 
escorting the president, who presented his 
annual report and then was requested to re- 
tire." Such action is unthinkable in this 
enlightened day, when every college presi- 
dent is ex-officio a member of his board of 
trustees and when the governing body would 
not presume to take any serious action with- 
out his presence. The latter-day board of 
trustees relies upon the president of the real 

45 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

college to devise systems of bookkeeping and 
filing so that the financial transactions of the 
institution are easily known and so that the 
registrar may give accurate information at 
a moment's notice. He must, by up-to-date 
business methods, make all the records of 
the institution permanent, comprehensive, 
and intelligible. He is expected to be states- 
man-like in his administration and to pro- 
pose for the acceptance of his board plans 
for future development that will command 
enthusiastic support. If new buildings are 
to be erected he will know what they ought 
to be and where they should be. The sad- 
dest spectacle in American college-making is 
not the wretched architecture of our build- 
ings, cheap as that is in poor imitation of 
European models. The most pitiable thing 
in the history of academic control of our 
country is the incongruous and unsightly ar- 
rangement of our college buildings. In most 
institutions, when enough money has been 
gathered together for a new structure of any 
character, the trustees have adjourned for 
a few minutes to walk about the campus, and 

46 



PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

after a half-honr's thought, on reassembling, 
they vote a location for the new bnilding as 
thongh it were the last one that would ever 
have a place on the grounds. The mistakes 
of the past are beyond recall, for poorly re- 
lated structures and ugly groupings are even 
to be preferred to the destruction of build- 
ings around which loving traditions cluster 
and which lend the indispensable effect of 
impressive antiquity. In recent years, 
though, there has been an awakening to the 
importance of building locations, and the 
president is indeed behind the times who 
does not give careful study to the placing of 
every new edifice, that he may direct his 
board aright when the hour arrives for final 
action. If he is wise, one of the first acts of 
his administration will be to recommend the 
employment of a competent landscape gar- 
dener. Under his direction this expert will 
prepare a plan of building groupings. This 
scheme will be made with the end in view 
of relating buildings to their uses in such a 
way as to produce an effect of harmonious 

47 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

beauty, and all future buildings will be lo- 
cated in accordance with this adopted scheme. 

If one feature of presidential duty may 
be emphasized at the expense of another, it 
will doubtless be agreed that the chief re- 
sponsibility of the college president is for 
his educational staff. Before boards of 
trustees came to a proper comprehension of 
their limitations they took official notice of 
the fitness or unfitness of every member of 
the faculty, and not only determined the re- 
tention or dismissal of incumbent professors 
and instructors, but solemnly debated the 
qualifications of all proposed candidates be- 
fore voting to fill a chair. Their opinion of 
the fitness of a teacher to continue was 
formed upon the reports concerning him 
brought from immature students or from 
some other incapable informant. As to the 
election of new faculty members, the board 
was governed in most instances by flatter- 
ingly worded and usually worthless testi- 
monials. 

It has not been many years since the 
trustees of a prominent institution in the 

48 



PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

Central West, becanse of some faculty dis- 
sensions on matters of discipline which conld 
not be accurately located, declared every col- 
lege chair vacant. To-day it would be diffi- 
cult to find a trustee presumptuous enough 
to entertain the thought of passing judg- 
ment on the qualifications of teachers. The 
president is charged with this responsibility, 
and the reputation of his institution must 
stand or fall on his ability to meet the re- 
sponsibility. The retention of present mem- 
bers of his faculty and the election of new 
members in the properly directed college will 
depend entirely upon his dictum. Those 
who object to granting such arbitrary power 
to one man will, on reflection, admit that to 
hold an executive responsible for all the 
work of an institution, including the teach- 
ing done, would be unfair unless therewith 
should go the privilege of choosing his col- 
leagues for whose work he must answer. In 
some instances the president is required by 
ordinance to nominate new faculty members, 
the board confirming or rejecting his nomi- 
nations. It is practically a universal cus- 
4 49 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

torn to require, in one form or another, the 
recommendation of the president as neces- 
sarily precedent to final action. As a rule 
an instructor who knows that the president 
will not recommend his retention, finds it of 
little avail to appeal to board members to 
decide otherwise. In a well-ordered college 
system he is referred back to the authority 
against whose judgment he enters appeal. 
Such power will not be used by a high-minded 
official, worthy of his position, in a tyran- 
nical way, and in no case will it be used to 
satisfy an individual grievance or to avenge 
a wrong, either real or fancied, on any mere 
personal grounds. 

The alumni of an institution are bound 
to Alma Mater through succeeding years 
more by their loving interest in their old 
teachers than by any other consideration. A 
few years distant from their own Commence- 
ment they know none of the student body, 
and when they return to the old college, more 
than for any other reason it is to sit for a 
brief while in loving devotion at the feet 
of the ripe scholars who were at once the in- 

50 



PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

spiration and the benediction of their forma- 
tive lives. Knowing this to be true, the pres- 
ident of the real college will spare no effort 
to secure the permanency of tenure of his 
teaching force. If here and there he finds 
a colleague whose work is not satisfactory 
and can not be made so, he will meet the 
situation fearlessly in the interest of the 
young people committed to his care, but he 
will also meet it with a thoughtful regard 
for the feelings of the colleague concerned. 
A resignation is always less painful than a 
dismissal. It tries the courage of a manly 
president more to ask, in the spirit of kind- 
ness, a resignation than it does in the pres- 
ence of his board to demand, with heartless- 
ness, a dismissal. The unpleasant responsi- 
bility will be accepted for the welfare of the 
institution, and in the fraternal spirit the un- 
satisfactory teacher will be approached by his 
president months before his connection with 
the college must be severed with a courteous 
request for his resignation. An instructor 
of good sense will appreciate the considera- 
tion that prevents a humiliating dismissal 

51 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

and affords him ample time, while still under 
pay, to find another position, and his resig- 
nation will be given as requested. He who 
lacks this fine sense of appreciation will still 
be dealt with in fearless kindness by his su- 
perior and will not be retained at the ex- 
pense of institutional efficiency. A capable 
teacher the president will endeavor to retain 
at any cost and will summon all his powers 
of legitimate persuasion to convince his 
board of the unwisdom of allowing another 
college to deprive them of the services of a 
pre-eminently successful teacher because of 
the alluring offer elsewhere of a somewhat 
larger salary. Added expense is worthy of 
little consideration when set over against a 
proved efficiency. 

No less care is required in making addi- 
tions to a faculty than in holding those who 
should be kept. It is much easier to get 
than to get rid of a man. Testimonials flat- 
tering in the extreme are easily obtained 
from those of large reputation. Indeed, it 
is notorious that some men boast that they 
give recommendations to all who ask them, 

52 



PRESIDENT OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

expecting that those to whom they are pre- 
sented will be able to read between the lines. 
Again, there are too many officials and heads 
of departments in large nniversities who are 
ever willing to unload their ^^dead timber" 
on some college, and if a strong recommen- 
dation gives promise of the desired relief 
they do not tarry long to conduct an argu- 
ment with conscience. Unusual educational 
advantages are not always to be depended 
upon as a guarantee of fitness for profes- 
sional appointment. It is generally known 
that there are many doctors of philosophy 
at large who would be utterly unequal to sat- 
isfactory work in a country school. On the 
other hand there are country teachers with- 
out large education who could do better 
service in college than the possessor of many 
diplomas. University-trained men are nu- 
merous, but scholarly teachers of magnetic 
enthusiasm are few. The capable president 
will not be satisfied until by months — and 
years, if need be — ^he has found the one from 
among the few who will give to his students 
the impetus they need to start them well on 

53 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

life's perilous jonrney. Eecommendations 
will be accepted for what they are worth, 
but no one will be finally employed without 
a personal interview, or until after many in- 
terviews, perhaps, that there may be dis- 
covered a personality of force. A half- 
hour's talk with a real man face to face is 
of infinitely more value than a barrel of tes- 
timonials, or degrees without number. 

The discreet president will, as a sound 
business man, hold his institution within the 
bounds of its financial limitations. Nothing 
so oppresses an institution or retards its 
growth as an incubus of debt. The wise 
executive will not allow his desire to keep 
pace with other colleges, or to surpass them, 
delude him into the belief that prosperity 
can be found by living beyond income. 

The president of the real college is a 
despot, and no limits will be set for his des- 
potism by his board of trustees so long as 
his power is not abused, while his institution 
thrives. 

In considering the obligations of the col- 
lege president to his faculty, the pith of 

54 



PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

it all may be entirely comprehended in the 
statement that he should be a leader without 
being a dictator. He is an executive — not 
an autocrat. The president of a college and 
a public school superintendent do not oc- 
cupy analogous positions in the matter of 
their authority over those who teach. The 
latter official directs a staff the majority of 
whom are elementary teachers. Many of 
these are so young in years and experience 
as to require the constant attention of a su- 
perior guiding mind. Then, too, the work 
of the various grades is so closely correlated 
that it would all be a failure unless each 
made its full contribution to the whole by 
following, without wavering, the plan con- 
ceived and laid down by a central authority. 
Constant and arbitrary supervision is a pre- 
requisite to the largest results in any public 
school system. The college president, on the 
other hand, is not an inspector, and need not 
be. His colleagues would rightly resent any 
such assumption of prerogative by him. 
Conditions in the college and in the public 
school are very different. The college pro- 

55 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

fessor is employed upon recommendation of 
his president because he is a specialist. 
Having had years of preparation for the 
work of his department, he should know far 
more in the line of his specialization than 
any college president, and he should be guar- 
anteed the largest liberty in determining the 
character of his work. Further than this, it 
should be recognized that college depart- 
ments in large measure are independent of 
each other. To be sure, certain preliminary 
mathematical study is necessarily antecedent 
to the study of higher mathematics. The 
same is true in languages and other branches 
of collegiate work, but these preliminaries are 
all within the department concerned, and the 
head of the department rather than the head 
of the institution is responsible for their 
proper presentation. There are certain re- 
lated groups of studies in different depart- 
ments pursued by students, but each part o£ 
the group is complete in itself without re- 
gard to its related group. It is evident, 
therefore, that upon departmental heads, 
and not upon the president of the college, 

56 



PEESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

should rest the full responsibility for the 
work of the department. It is true that the 
president is responsible for the work of his 
college, and that sometimes he fails to do 
his full duty to his students by a negligence 
in this respect, which he excuses on the 
ground that ^'professors are supposed to 
know their business/' The wide-awake pres- 
ident may know of the competency or incom- 
petency of his colleagues by ways more accu- 
rate than personal inspection can guarantee. 
The college community is much more compact 
than a large public school system. The profes- 
sors do their work in classroom, library, and 
laboratory, in buildings on the same grounds 
and near to each other. The president, when 
at home, is constantly in their midst, and, 
with his hand ever on the college pulse, he 
knows more of what his subordinates are 
thinking and accomplishing than the public 
school superintendent knows of his teachers 
after all his inspection. The daily inter- 
course of the president with his co-workers 
in faculty and committee meetings, in pri- 
vate conference and in social relationships, 

57 . 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

will give to the keen reader of men a knowl- 
edge which will enable him to render fair 
judgment on fitness in the day of final reck- 
oning. The president's office is a veritable 
cesspool where all unpleasant experiences 
are deposited. All complaints of parents 
and students are left there, and if the presi- 
dent, as a spiritual chemist, is skillful in fil- 
tering, the residuum will reveal to him the 
actual substance of all that is justly charge- 
able against his complained-of colleagues. 
The president presides at the meetings of 
his faculty, and knowing that a college fac- 
ulty is a deliberative body, in which major- 
ities rightly control, he will make his rec- 
ommendations and then commit their desti- 
nies to the hands of his associates, leaving 
them to do with them as they will. When 
the faculty has acted, whether in accordance 
with his views or not, the president will exe- 
cute as directed, in willing obedience to the 
American principle of majority rule. 

It will be agreed that the general policy 
of the institution should be shaped by the 
president as its responsible head, and yet 

58 



PEESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

the teaching corps shares with him, accord- 
ing to time-honored precedent, administra- 
tive duties as is not done ontside the college. 
When it has once been determined jnst what 
work belongs to the president and what he 
divides with his colleagnes, there will be no 
unpleasant clashing of authority. The diffi- 
culty is that here and there is a president 
unsatisfied unless his will dominates every 
department of academic endeavor. He feels 
that division of labor will spell diminution 
of his power. He is jealous of his authority 
and hesitates to make slightest relinquish- 
ment of anything that will keep him promi- 
nent as a central figure. The truly great 
president is he who recognizes with a mod- 
ern writer of rising fame that ^^The best 
crowns have fallen to those who have not 
sought them." His wisdom will be shown 
in skillful distribution of work among his 
faculty members according to their several 
capabilities. The successful college presi- 
dent is not he who attends to every detail in 
person, but rather the one who masters de- 
tails by handing them over to other compe- 

59 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

tent persons. Knowing his faculty, the pres- 
ident who does things will appoint his com- 
mittees with such good judgment that his 
college system will be a well-adjusted and 
perfectly working machine. He will watch- 
fully guard his own prerogatives. He should 
have the veto power, such as is granted in 
many colleges. Such privilege, though, he 
will not make his to abuse. He will use it 
only in those rare instances when he is con- 
vinced that a faculty action is thoroughly 
inimical to institutional welfare. In most 
cases, having conceded to his associates in 
the faculty the right to consider certain ques- 
tions with him on merit, he will be governed 
by the expressed opinion of the greater num- 
ber, even though it run counter to his own, 
for his confidence in his fellows will lead 
him to conclude that the judgment of the 
sincere many must be superior to that of 
the sincere one. It often happens that a 
discussion in faculty meeting is so illumi- 
nating that the president, broad enough to 
hold himself open to conviction, experiences 
an entire change of mind on a given matter, 

60 



PEESIDENT OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

and he is forever afterward glad that he 
permitted his own views to be modified by 
those who had seen better than himself. The 
president who thus shirks no responsibility, 
who safeguards the interests of his col- 
leagues before the board of trustees and de- 
fers with fraternal courtesy on all proper 
subjects to their opinions will be supported 
with an unfailing and effective loyalty. 

It must never be forgotten that the col- 
lege president has an inescapable obligation 
to his alumni. The graduates of the college 
are always ready to bring their loving hom- 
age and lay it at the feet of the man who 
controls the destinies of Alma Mater. In 
turn this man should make the college the 
permanent servant of all its sons and daugh- 
ers to advance their spiritual and material 
well-being. The younger graduates should 
have the co-operation of their college in get- 
ting properly started in life's work. The 
alumni of all the years will appreciate the 
interest of the institution that educated them 
in making their achievements known to the 
world and in using them to inspire the gen- 

61 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

erations coming after. The president who 
knows how to put men to good nses will re- 
alize that one of the valuable assets of a 
successful administration is a devoted body 
of enthusiastic alumni. 

It is to the undergraduates — that incho- 
ate and ebullient mass of turbulent energy 
and tormenting ambitions called the stu- 
dent body — that the president sustains rela- 
tions of most solemn and sacred obligation. 
These keen young minds will read him 
through and through. To others he may 
make himself opaque. To his students he is 
always thoroughly transparent. If nothing 
else can make him humble, their knowledge 
of him will always hold him close to the 
ground. What wonderful possibilities of 
service are open to him through them if in 
all honesty he is ever just what he seems to 
be, and nothing more. There is no stronger 
disciple of the gospel of the ^^ square deal" 
than the young collegian. A president will 
never control him by abuse. He will not win 
him by oppression. College students hold 
tyranny and play to the galleries in equal 

62 



PEESIDENT OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

contempt. They like an expression of confi- 
dence and appreciation when it is merited. 
They will accept deserved rebnke properly 
administered. They despise nnmerited com- 
mendation. They honor perfect frankness. 
The alert mind of yonth is quick to distin- 
guish between the genuine and the counter- 
feit. 

A college president can afford to be an 
artisan in raising money. He can afford to 
be nothing less than an artist in shaping im- 
mortal men. He is a molder of public sen- 
timent, and the chapel hour affords him his 
finest opportunity for this service. Sad will 
it be for academic ideals when students and 
faculties are not brought together daily in 
public congregation. It is true that Presi- 
dent Eliot has made a covert attack on the 
time-honored chapel service in American col- 
leges by declaring that the college student 
*^has a right to be free from all inducements 
to cant, hypocrisy, or conformity. On this 
account voluntary attendance is a valuable 
element in academic freedom. No student 
ought to be able to suppose that he will gain 

63 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

anything towards high rank as a scholar or 
social standing or popularity among his fel- 
lows by any religious observance or affilia- 
tion whatsoever. A mercenary or profit- 
seeking spirit in religious practices is very 
injurious to young people and is peculiarly 
repulsive in them.'' 

The writer has never supposed and does, 
not believe that many others suppose that 
chapel services are required for the purpose 
of giving to students high rank in scholar- 
ship or to guarantee social standing or to 
make popularity. If the United States is, 
as is so often asserted, a Christian nation, 
surely a brief half -hour set aside every day 
when teachers and taught are expected to 
meet together to make united acknowledg- 
ment of blessings and to offer petition for 
continued mercies from the God of the uni- 
verse and the Savior of men, is not incon- 
sistent with our notions of freedom. There 
are some institutions supported by public 
taxation that have shown reprehensible cow- 
ardice on this question of religious teaching 
and requirement. The fact that men of all 

64 



PEESIDENT OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

creeds and men of no creed support these 
institutions is not reason sufficient for fail- 
ure to make the Christian ideal permanent. 
America is a Christian nation, and there is 
no valid excuse for an un-Christian atmos- 
phere in an institution supported by a Chris- 
tian commonwealth under a Christian fed- 
eration. The authorities of State universi- 
ties and city colleges, apparently forgetful 
that democracy means majority rule, are too 
wont to make apologetic concessions to a 
minority. It is not much wonder, therefore, 
that some academic communities are seeth- 
ing cauldrons of religious skepticism, if not 
hotbeds of disturbing agnosticism and de- 
spairing atheism. The same sad things are 
true of some of our greater institutions of 
private foundation, where a similar excuse 
need not be offered for religious remissness. 
It will not, of course, be denied by any broad- 
minded person that the minority is entitled 
to a respectful consideration of its convic- 
tions at the hands of the majority. It is 
only fair, therefore, that certain students in 
church colleges as well as in State and mu- 
5 65 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

nicipal institutions should be excused from 
compulsory attendance on religious exercises 
if their religious beliefs forbid them. In a 
prominent Western college supported by tax- 
ation it is the practice of the president at 
the beginning of every college year to an- 
nounce that all students are expected to at- 
tend daily chapel services, but that if, for 
conviction's sake, any desire to be excused, 
a written request from parent or guardian 
will release them from this obligation. It 
is remarkable that in five years there has 
not been one such request lodged by either 
Jew or Gentile. The chapel service in that 
institution does not follow the printed order 
adopted by any particular sect or creed, but, 
on the other hand, no apology direct or im- 
plied is ever offered for the prominence 
given the ideals and teachings of the Divine 
Christ. More than that, the services and 
exercises are so attractive that the students 
are glad to attend. A brilliant and promis- 
ing young man of the Eoman Catholic faith, 
who was Junior in the college referred to, 
was recently asked by a visitor if students 

66 



PEESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

were required to attend chapel, and the im- 
mediate answer was, ^^Yes, but we should 
go without compulsion, for we would feel 
that we were missing something of value by 
absence. '^ 

At Yale University the students some- 
times chafe under required chapel attend- 
ance, but several times in recent years, when 
the question has been under discussion, the 
latest graduates have voted overwhelmingly 
against the abandonment of the requirement. 

Chancellor McCracken, of New York Uni- 
versity, has an open offer to his students of 
an option between chapel attendance and a 
literary production, and the chapel service 
has a decided advantage in popularity. 

Responsibility for Christian example can 
not be escaped by the Christian educator, 
and students honor those who have the cour- 
age of their convictions. A spineless teacher 
is youth's abhorred antipathy. 

The religious value aside, the chapel serv- 
ice is the president's great opportunity. 
Here, where every student meets every other 
student daily in elbow touch, and where he 

67 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

should meet all his instructors face to face, 
is developed that esprit de corps which welds 
all into the oneness of a college solidarity in- 
vulnerable and invincible. Here the artist 
president, with his faculty behind him and 
his students before him, may mold at will 
the personal, the civic, and the religious 
ideals of the coming man. He will not 
preach, but his suggestive remarks will be 
seed in a fertile soil that will yield an abun- 
dant harvest. A passage of Scripture effect- 
ively read or a word of simple prayer fer- 
vently offered may be so deeply impressed 
as to transform a life or change a nation's 
destiny. On this chapel platform, after de- 
votions are over, a pleasant turn may be 
given to an announcement so that the hearty 
applause or ringing laughter will send the 
before despondent student away with a new 
song upon his lips. The observing president 
knows that frequent cheers for the country's 
flag intensifies love of the flag and of all 
for which it stands. As a wise man, there- 
fore, he will divide his public chapel service 
into two distinct parts, so that when the dig- 

68 



PRESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

nified religious service is finished the secu- 
lar part will allow an occasional outlet for 
surplus vitality through college or class yells, 
thereby increasing the love of students for 
the institution for which they cheer. 

There will be times, but only at rare inter- 
vals, when the president may need to be se- 
vere in public denunciation of wrong atti- 
tudes or actions, and without the chapel 
service or something akin thereto there will 
be no opportunity to reach the student body. 
An appreciative word of commendation for 
a winning team or for a lofty principle main- 
tained by an organization, coming from the 
president, will strengthen those who hear to 
steel themselves for greater future achieve- 
ments. An appeal wisely worded and skill- 
fully presented from the rostrum will hardly 
ever fail to meet with a hearty response. A 
company of college students is the easiest 
body in the world controlled when rightly 
handled; it is the easiest body on earth to 
antagonize when wrongly handled. Coarse 
work here is fatal to good results. Halt the 
coming of the day when the college president 

69 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

shall abdicate his throne of power, the chapel 
platform ! 

The president of the real college knows 
his students. Professors may address them 
as ^^Mr/' or ^^Miss," but the president 
knows and calls them by their given names, 
thns making them feel in their absence from 
home that there is one at least who feels 
something of parental interest in them. 
They like this and appreciate the pains a 
bnsy man has taken in them to know them 
as they are known at home. Too great fa- 
miliarity with young people will work in- 
jury, but greater injury will be wrought by 
the college president whose indolence or 
coldness prevents the establishment of 
friendly relations with his students. The 
president's home should be the Mecca of 
every tired, restless, and homesick student. 
Not only should the president realize the 
obligation that rests upon him to establish 
right ideals of social forms and conventions 
by swinging wide the doors of his house for 
frequent receptions to students and faculty, 
but every young person in his care should 

70 



PEESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

feel himself drawn to his president's home 
in every time of need. The good president 
will feel it a privilege to rise at any hour 
of the night to meet a student in need of 
counsel or sympathy, and blessed indeed is 
the young collegian who knows that he dares 
to make such an emergency call. The presi- 
dent, alive to his possibilities, will not wait 
for his students to come to him. He will 
go to them. He will be a frequent visitor 
at their rooms in the dormitory and the fra- 
ternity house. Visiting often, not for the 
purpose of espionage, but to bring the en- 
couragement of good cheer, his students will 
expect him at any time; they will come to 
anticipate his visits with pleasure, and they 
will always be prepared in body and spirit 
to receive him. Of course, all this would 
be impossible in an over-large institution, 
but then it is the real college that is un- 
der discussion. 

The pathway of the president of such a 
college is pleasant for the most part. It is 
well, though, to bear in mind that it is not 
rose-bordered all the way. Among those 

71 



THE REAL COLLEGE 

who come to college are some to whom good 
influence and warm interest make no appeal. 
They will not be inspired to noble endeavor 
by any sacrifice. There are others whose im- 
pulses are all good, but in a moment of weak- 
ness perhaps they yield to a temptation that 
not only brings personal discredit but also 
works irreparable injury to their college. 
The president, warm-hearted and sympa- 
thetic, will reach out a helping hand to every 
one that it is within his power to save. He 
will have the spirit that is willing to for- 
give the individual seventy times seven if 
perchance he may save him without in- 
jury to larger interests. To confuse real 
sympathy with superficial sentimentalism, 
though, would make a college president 
worse than a mere figurehead in the estab- 
lishment and maintenance of right ideals of 
life. Love of youth, without a proper sense 
of justice in such a man, is equally as bad 
as cold-blooded justice without love. The 
executive who acts in sorrow, but who acts 
because he must, in severely disciplining an 
offender will be respected by the offender 

72 



PEESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

and will be honored no less by the rank 
and file of students for exhibition of stern 
justice than for the show of virtuous pa- 
tience. 

In all things the real president, then, is 
he whose force of character will command 
respect. His sense of propriety will be 
made manifest in all the functions of his 
high office. He will be a youth among youth 
on the campus and in all suitable places; 
his students will come to expect, though, in 
all formal affairs from the reception of dis- 
tinguished visitors during the college year 
to that climax of all academic events, the 
conferring of degrees on Commencement 
day, that he will conduct himself in a man- 
ner which shows a dignified conception of 
his great responsibilities. The nobility of 
character uniformly preserved from day to 
day, year in and year out, by the ideal col- 
lege president, will provoke in young lives 
surrounding him a laudable emulation to 
noble life and honorable service. He will be 
loved for what he is, as Arnold of Eugby, 
and Jowett, the Master of Baliol, were loved 

73 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

by their English boys. They will think it 
a shame to be mean, because he believes 
them to be in general opposition to meanness. 

The commercialization of the college pres- 
idency is a reprehensible evil of this new 
academic age. The president of the real 
college is a teacher. Without the teachers' 
work he will lack the teachers ' influence. Un- 
less he is responsible for a chair and shows 
scholarship in his teaching, he will be looked 
upon as a mere business manager and will 
be without that weight of influence which is 
the accompaniment of scholarly authority in 
some one great subject of human thought. 
The classroom is the college president's 
^^open sesame" to the mind of youth and to 
his heart. President Harper, that wonder- 
working university builder of modern times, 
never relinquished his teaching, and every 
undergraduate looked forward with whetted 
anticipation to the day prior to graduation 
when he should sit as a learner in the class- 
room of this great president. 

An organizer, a publicist, a financier, an 
orator, an author, a scholar, a teacher, a 

74 



PEESIDENT OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

judge of men, a gentleman, a virile Chris- 
tian, a lover of yonth, a forceful leader — all 
these are embodied in the president of the 
real college. He makes that indefinable, in- 
tangible, yet wonderfully real thing we call 
a college atmosphere. How big his possi- 
bilities ! How boundless his responsibilities ! 



75 



THE STUDENTS OF THE REAL 
COLLEGE 



THE STUDENTS OF THE REAL 
COLLEGE 

The purpose of a college must be borne 
in mind when its student body is under dis- 
cussion. The real college, with the sense of 
the responsibility resting upon it for culture 
and discipline, seeks to reach each of its stu- 
dents as an individual. Its endeavor is to 
lay broad and strong and deep the founda- 
tions of character for the erection of a suit- 
able superstructure of specialization and cit- 
izenship. To these ends it will spare no 
efforts for the establishment of habits of in- 
dustry, and thoroughness in the mastery of 
difficulties, and persistency in resisting evil 
and shiftless inclinations. 

If this general purpose is to be accom- 
plished, the student body in our real college 
must not be so large and unwieldy that the 
individual is lost in the mass. President 
Schurmann, of Cornell University, has de- 

79 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

clared that our educational problem is this: 
*^Can we do anything for the development 
of creative reason in America?'^ He insists 
that the ^ teacher realize that reason is im- 
plicit in the pupil and that it is his busi- 
ness to draw it out — this achievement is the 
object of all education.'^ As though in- 
spired, Doctor Schurmann says: 

^^We are too prone to rest in mere knowl- 
edge of facts. Of course, it is easier to 
teach the boy facts than to train him to 
think; and our big schools and large classes 
make the problem still more di^cult. Yet 
the true method of teaching was formulated 
and illustrated by Socrates. It is the method 
of personal intercourse with constant chal- 
lenging of the reasoning faculty. It is no 
accident that Socrates produced a Plato, or 
that Plato again produced an Aristotle. In 
America we have been too prone to regard 
the teacher as an automatic pump, and the 
boy's mind as a tub to be filled. The boy's 
mind is really a spark of the divine reason 
and the business of education is to fan it 
into a living flame." 

Is it conceivable that this spark can be- 
come a flame without the close personal 

80 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

contact of the Master Teacher with the in- 
cipient thought-life of the student? Is it 
possible to have this contact of the mature 
personality with the immature elsewhere 
than in a college with a limited number of 
students? Amherst College and Williams 
College, it will be agreed, are fair represen- 
tatives of the best type of the real college 
in America. In 1906-1907 the enrollment at 
Amherst was four hundred and seventy-five, 
and at Williams four hundred and ninety- 
six. With numbers like these it is possible 
for those who teach to impress their per- 
sonalities upon the taught in a way so 
strongly inspirational that the fires of zeal 
for true culture may be kindled from em- 
bers of heredity into bright, glowing flames 
of self-activity. 

Unfortunate indeed is the student who is 
so lost in a wilderness of numbers that he 
is unable to find his way out into the im- 
mediate light of his teacher's presence — sad 
his lot when there are too many of his kind 
gathered at one place to guarantee him from 
6 81 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

his instructors the individual attention that 
is his crying need. 

Thrice unfortunate the student in the 
midst of the crowd who is obliged to depend 
upon his own unaided efforts in choosing his 
courses and electing his studies without wise 
suggestion from an experienced and inter- 
ested elder. *^ Student freedom'' is a eupho- 
nious and fascinating expression that has be- 
come very popular in recent years. No pro- 
gressive twentieth-century educator would 
care to put upon the youthhood of our col- 
leges the straight-jackets that were worn by 
the collegians of a century agone. We all 
rejoice in the liberty which guarantees to 
the student in our day the right to think 
and act for himself. It is barely possible, 
however, that we have overstepped ourselves 
in concessions to our boasted academic free- 
dom. While we guarantee the student the 
right to work out his own intellectual sal- 
vation, is it not better that his undeveloped 
judgment should be directed, not repressed, 
by the compulsion of a mature personality? 
In a recent address on ^^ Academic Free- 

82 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

dom^' before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of 
Cornell University, President Eliot, of Har- 
vard University, speaking of freedom for 
students, said: 

^^ Interest in a subject is an indication of 
fitness for its study, or, in other words, a 
student is much more likely to succeed in 
a subject which interests him strongly than 
in a subject which does not. Achievement 
and gain in power are the true rewards of 
persistent exertion and the best spurs to fur- 
ther effort. The college student ought to 
be free to specialize early in his course or 
not to specialize at all; to make his educa- 
tion turn on languages, mathematics, his- 
tory, science, or philosophy — for example — 
or on any mixture of the great subjects.'' 

President Eliot, unsurpassed among the 
scholars of our day in the use of pure Anglo- 
Saxon, nevertheless adopts easily the cus- 
tom of more careless Americans in using 
the terms college and university interchang- 
ably, as though they were perfect syno- 
nyms. It is evident, though, in speaking of 
the freedom that should be accorded to stu- 
dents hereinbefore quoted, that he really re- 

83 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

f ers to the undergradnate — the collegian. It 
is not unthinkable that in the largeness of his 
institution and with his multitudinous duties 
pressing upon, President Eliot has become 
so far removed from intimate contact with 
his undergraduate students that he has con- 
fused them in his thought with the stronger 
minds and ripened judgment of those ready 
for advanced study and research in the grad- 
uate and professional schools of his institu- 
tion. It is certain, at any rate, that he as- 
sumes for undergraduates a maturity of 
judgment that in reality has no existence 
in the mind of the average college student. 
It is the experience of those who have for 
years been identified with work in the real 
college that the student permitted to make 
his own choice of subjects or courses in the 
beginning has often come to the day of grad- 
uation with the expressed regret on his lips 
that he had not taken very different studies. 
The young man or woman fresh from the 
preparatory school comes to college with ex- 
aggerated notions of his own rights and 
with little knowledge of his own needs. 

84 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

That which he thinks he does not want may- 
be the very thing he requires for his well- 
ronnded development. The college is not a 
school of specialization, and the student 
there does not know and need not know what 
his vocation in life is to be. The real col- 
lege seeks to prepare a student for a suc- 
cessful career by providing him with a sub- 
structure of body, mind, and character that 
will enable him in later years to build 
thereon any superstructure that his devel- 
oped talents and mature wisdom may lead 
him to choose. Certain peripatetic lyceum 
lecturers have been going about the country 
in recent years and, declaiming from the 
platform, they have shouted that there never 
has been and never can be such a thing as 
a symmetrical man or woman. ^^Born 
short ^' is the expression on which these fren- 
zied preachers ring the changes. That no 
one comes into the world with the begin- 
nings of a symmetrical personality is a tru- 
ism as old as human intelligence. The dec- 
laration can not be relieved of its triteness 
even though, for the sake of startling at- 

85 



THE REAL COLLEGE 

tractiveness, it be clothed in new rhetorical 
garb. It is admitted without argument, in 
the most promising cases, that childhood and 
youth never come to the beginning of any 
educational period with an endowment of 
evenly balanced abilities. The linguistic tal- 
ent of one may be strong, while the mathe- 
matical gift is very weak. The literary 
taste of another may be pronounced and the 
scientific bent scarcely discernible. It is in 
recognition of this inequality of talent that 
our whole system of preliminary education 
has its existence. The chief object of the 
elementary school, the secondary school, and 
the college is to fertilize the physical and 
spiritual waste places in the coming man. 

To develop the growing youth by follow- 
ing the line of the least resistance in each 
case is to invite into being an abnormal in- 
dividuality — a grotesque monstrosity. It is 
universally recognized that one weak mem- 
ber of the body means a weakened effi- 
ciency for the remaining members. It is 
equally true of the whole man. A puny, 
sickly body is insufficient support for an 

86 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

alert mind. A weak mind will grant license 
to a strong body for evil deeds. Spiritually 
speaking, the same truth holds good. A vig- 
orous intellect can not bring to fruition its 
conclusions unless reinforced by a devel- 
oped will. A strong will may send a weak 
intellect on many a fooPs errand or push 
an unfinished moral nature to the commis- 
sion of crime. There are already too many 
lopsided people in the land of the living. 

With all the education possible it is doubt- 
less true that a perfectly symmetrical man- 
hood or womanhood can not be presented as 
the product. This fact, however, does not 
relieve those charged with the responsibility 
of teaching from the obligation of earnest 
endeavor to produce a uniform and well- 
balanced personality. Much of the failure 
among men in later life is due to the fact 
that specialization has found unsteady foot- 
ing on uneven foundation stones. The su- 
perstructure of vocation totters to its early 
fall on a groundwork firm at one point and 
fragile at others. 

The solemn responsibility resting heavily 
87 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

on the real college is to give to the student 
that training. which shall present him to the 
university or professional school at the end 
of his course so well rounded in body, mind, 
and spirit that the superstructure when 
erected will stand forever secure. 

There is no more pathetic picture in our 
modern life than that which shows a group 
of unformed young people about a college 
bulletin board, at the beginning of a new 
semester, endeavoring to select from the 
schedule of studies those which will prove 
easiest for them or most to their liking. If 
our educational forebears, who were college 
professors fifty years ago, were to come 
forth in resurrection robes and hear these; 
young people in their mad hunt for sinecures 
saying: ^^0, take that! It 's a snap!'' or, 
^' Enter that course, it 's all lectures!" or, 
'^ Fight shy of that unless you want to cut 
out your dances this term!" they would flee 
in horrified haste back to their charnel 
houses, glad to hide their humiliation in eter- 
nal oblivion beneath the whitening dust of 
their crumbling bones. 

88 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

It is not easy for the proud spirit to 
brave the obloquy of ^^progressive educa- 
tors'' by declaring against the modern elect- 
ive system. Indeed, it is not likely that any 
modern thinker would advocate a return to 
the old narrow system of limited required 
courses for the Baccalaureate degree. As 
the modern curricula in many instances are 
too large in the freedom they grant for par- 
tial development, those of other days were 
too inflexible to allow growth of the inde- 
pendent thought and action essential to later 
success. To permit a youth ^^to make his 
education turn on languages, mathematics, 
history, science, or philosophy, or any mix- 
ture of these great subjects,'' as President 
Eliot suggests, is to grant a freedom for 
one-sided development or a scrap-book ma- 
turity. In either event the final product is 
an unfinished man. To allow a student to 
study history because he does not like mathe- 
matics is to grant him the privilege of for- 
ever depriving himself of the sequential rea- 
soning power necessary to make the culture 
of the languages effective. To allow one 

89 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

who is lacking the scientific mind, because 
of that fact, to devote himself exclusively to 
history is to prohibit to him the equipment 
that science has to offer him for the classi- 
fication of his historical knowledge. Because 
crude youth lacks, in the beginning, a taste 
for the humanities is not reason sufficient 
for the final closing of the door to those soul- 
developing influences in his life offered by 
the problems of philosophy and the beauties 
of literature. 

The real college grants to its students 
large elective freedom, but its courses are 
so grouped that it is possible for the student, 
while following his natural bent, to find no 
way of escape from the study of those sub- 
jects which supplement natural inclination 
in the way that will make this natural in- 
clination, when developed, most effective. 
The real college, recognizing the great im- 
portance of personal contact between teacher 
and taught, will at the very beginning of the 
student's college life guide him in mapping 
out his course as the needs of his case make 
revelation. Entrance credits and examina- 

90 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

tions which now demand a certain prepara- 
tion for admission should be amplified by 
the authorities of the real college, and the 
prospective student should be examined in 
the beginning as to his talents and his lack, 
his tastes and his antipathies, that the col- 
lege course may give him, by its discipline 
and its culture, the training necessary to pre- 
pare him for effective service in coming 
years. 

Bigness in numbers tends to destroy the 
sense of individual responsibility. Unfor- 
tunate is the student so swallowed up in the 
crowd that his consciousness of personal 
obligation is lost. Is it not easy for such 
a student to feel that it is right for the in- 
stitution to suffer the reproach that he as 
a person would shrink from suffering? 

The student body in the real college is 
not of one sex. Speaking alone for the young 
man, let it be said that an Eveless Eden is 
impossible, and if it were possible it would 
seriously cripple him in the developing pe- 
riod of his life. Some very strong argu- 
ments may be advanced for the education of 

91 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

young women in isolation. Solicitous par- 
ents and anxious friends are justified in 
every sensible endeavor to safeguard the 
young woman against all possible imposition 
by wickedness upon innocence. To preserve 
the sweetness of the girlish spirit as the nu- 
cleus of a noble womanhood is their solemn 
duty. It is borne out by the experience of 
the years, however, that the young man 
of prankish mind and the young woman 
with love of adventure in her heart find the 
walls that shut one out and the other in a 
challenge to their spirit of daring, and un- 
less these forbidding walls are leveled, they 
stand but to convict two souls of shameful 
cowardice. 

The scandal that is so much feared as 
the result of bringing young men and women 
together in college relations is almost never 
realized by fulfillment of the fear. On the 
contrary, the attempt at artificial separation 
in holding girls confined alone has often 
brought sad consequences because of the un- 
conventional means employed by young men 
and women in conspiracy to get together 

92 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

through defiance of unnatural restraint. 
Young women under sensible chaperonage in 
a co-educational institution establish easilj^ 
for themselves a code of conventions, the vi- 
olation of which, either by man or woman, 
brings a rebuke of censure far more effective 
as a preventive against a future breach than 
a thousand brick walls reared by unsympa- 
thetic authority. It is inevitable that some 
day women must be brought face to face 
with men, and if in the formative period of 
life they learn to meet them properly, the 
chances are that in the coming years of con- 
firmed judgment they will never meet them 
improperly. 

In any event there is only one side to the 
argument, so far as young men are con- 
cerned. That they are advantaged by the re- 
straints of womanly presence on the campus 
and in the classroom is easily demonstrated 
by comparing the manners and characters 
of young men who are students in colleges 
for men only with those of young men who 
attend coeducational institutions. Isolation 

of men in college no less than in a mining 

93 



• THE EEAL COLLEGE 

camp induces brutality and degrading coarse- 
ness. We do not want in America the swag- 
ger of the German student whose claim to 
distinction is determined by the bulldog pipe, 
the flowing beer mug, the ribald song, and 
the number of scars the duels fought by him 
have left upon his face. 

The football field is made more respect- 
able by the presence and loyal support of 
the girl students. A sentiment, encouraged 
by high authority, has been growing in re- 
cent years that may entirely destroy the 
chivalric spirit of the American gentleman. 
In our effort to develop a rugged manhood 
there should be a care that we do not lose 
the finer spiritual qualities in the bestial 
masculinity of a mere animal strength. 
There is a worse evil under the sun than 
the gentle spirit in men. Better a ''Molly 
Coddle" than a ''Bill Bruiser. '^ The mili- 
tant spirit is not the ideal of this new age. 
To solve the social, industrial, and political 
problems that are the challenge of advanc- 
ing civilization, to meet the business com- 
petition as man should meet man, to fulfill 

94 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

the expectations of the home life, and to 
make the Church of the living God puissant 
in the uplift of humanity, a sturdy manhood 
of keen mind and gentle heart is required. 
A strong body and a fearless spirit are al- 
ways essential, but moral courage rather 
than physical daring will hasten the morning 
dawn of the perfect day. A lofty concep- 
tion of honor, a generous appreciation of 
the claims of others, a fine sense of justice, 
a boldness to do the right at any cost, a 
zeal for virtue, an unaffected gentility, and 
a love for toil will give to the world its 
mightiest potentiality for good — a manly 
gentleman. Such a type of genuine man- 
hood can be developed only by association 
with womanhood — where native roughness 
becomes the brave spirit of gallant knight- 
hood by the tempering process the constant 
presence of the gentler sex compels. 

Better intellectual results are secured 
where men meet women on a footing of com- 
petition in the classroom. A young man will 
often allow a more industrious student of 
his own sex to surpass him, but the pride of 

95 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

inherent manhood will make the achieve- 
ment of the young woman at his side an 
incentive to endeavor that will bring out by 
honest toil the best of which his intellect is 
capable. The real college is a college for 
men and women. The relative number of 
women to men has no large place in this dis- 
cussion. It may be said in passing that a 
majority of women present in any institu- 
tion tends to discourage the virile spirit 
that should be grown. The feminization of 
men by overwhelming numbers of women is 
exceedingly undesirable. One young woman 
to four young men in a given student body 
would seem to be about the proper ratio to 
give to manhood the needful stimulus for 
earnest work and gentlemanly bearing. 

The students in the real college are dem- 
ocratic. In the large institution bigness is 
the foe to democracy. The numbers there 
are sufficient to enable those who come from 
a particular social class to bind themselves 
together in groups that are large enough 
without the necessity of seeking those who 
belong to another class. The sons of the 

96 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

rich gravitate toward those of their fellows 
who are scions of the same artificial aristoc- 
racy. Those of moderate means are driven 
by exclnsion from the wealthier clubs to find 
their associates among those of their kind, 
while those whose poverty commands toil to 
give them the means for their education must 
struggle through the course as best they 
may without comfort of the Protean com- 
radeship which means so much in academic 
life. 

In the real college, where every student 
knows every other student, the numbers are 
not large enough to permit the formation of 
cliques on unnatural lines. Here the son of 
wealth touches elbows with the son of toil, 
and the reciprocal love and respect induced 
are a preparation for the coming better day, 
when the only caste recognized in American 
civilization will be the caste of efficiency. 
Thus is the real college the largest hope for 
the breaking down of those unnatural bar- 
riers which are the menace of our national 
perpetuity. The authorities of the large 
universities with college departments are 
7 97 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

coming to recognize the great advantage 
that the real college enjoys by its limited 
numbers for the development of true de- 
mocracy. Already some of them are devis- 
ing means to bring to their institutions the 
advantages which are now the exclusive 
property of the institution smaller in the 
number of its students. Doctor Woodrow 
Wilson, one of the most progressive of mod- 
ern university presidents, an administrator 
who is striving in the spirit of sanity to 
hold for his institution all that is best of 
the old, while he reaches out to claim for 
his own all that is good in the new, has 
proposed a means of bringing all the oppor- 
tunities for the nurture of democracy that 
belong to the real college into the under- 
graduate college of the university. In a re- 
cent report to his board of trustees Presi- 
dent "Wilson has recommended a scheme that 
would ^^draw the undergraduates together 
in residential squads, in which they shall eat 
as well as lodge together, every undergrad- 
uate being required actually to live in his 
squad, each squad being likewise provided 

98 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

with a handsome common room for the pur- 
pose of social intercourse, in addition to the 
common dining-room and common kitchen/' 
It is doubtful whether this plan will accom- 
plish what is hoped for it. The democratic 
spirit may be developed within the squad, 
but along therewith there will be a corre- 
sponding loss of loyalty to the name of 
Princeton. Love for the ideals of the squad 
will supplant love for the ideals and tradi- 
tions of the institution. In the real college 
the squad is not a wheel within a wheel — it 
is the whole student body of the institution. 
There the name of the college is given to 
the one and only squad, and loyalty to the 
institution with its customs and standards 
is inevitable and supreme. The Princeton 
plan contemplates a modification of the Eng- 
lish system of multiplied colleges, the squad 
being substituted for the college. There will 
be this difference between the English col- 
lege and the Princeton plan: At Oxford the 
loyalty of the students is always for the col- 
lege of their membership, rather than for 
that well-nigh intangible something called 

99 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

the University of Oxford, whicli exists only 
by the sufferance of several individual col- 
leges. The students shout for Merton or 
Oriel, or Christ Church, or Baliol or Mag- 
dalen, and the coat of arms they revere is 
that of their college rather than that of the 
university. Princeton will hardly care to sac- 
rifice the chief asset of her development, loy- 
alty to the university, to loyalty to a squad. 
The devotion of alumni to the corporate 
name is always to be preferred even above 
the democratic spirit. The real democracy, 
as a feature of academic life, can be realized 
only by its nurture in smaller groups. As 
the size of the Swiss Eepublic has made it 
the purest type of a democratic government 
among the nations, so to the real college, 
alone, is committed the exclusive mission 
of undergraduate democratization. If the 
larger universities are willing to break their 
undergraduate bodies up into small groups, 
with a sacrifice thereby of loyalty for the 
greater institution, we may grow this indis- 
pensable spirit of our Americanism there — 

100 



STUDENTS OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

otherwise the real college will continue to 
be the nursery of true democracy. 

The real college is exclusive — not in the 
sense of refusing its opportunities to young 
people from any walk of life or any condi- 
tion of purse. It is not exclusive in the 
recognition of the European idea of family 
aristocracy. The real college, standing for 
a nobility of character, is exclusive in the 
matter of numbers and in standards of 
scholarship and life. It demands from those 
who would become students a thorough 
readiness for college life, and those who 
can show a burning desire for intellectual 
achievement and a lofty moral conception 
are eligible for admission to its halls. When 
these requirements have been satisfied no 
question of possession or birthright will be 
raised. Indeed, to realize an ideal condi- 
tion, the students in the real college will rep- 
resent, as to parentage, a diversity of occu- 
pations. Exclusive in the sense of limited 
numbers, ability, and character, the spirit 
of true democracy can best be grown in an 
atmosphere where the youthful offspring of 

101 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

farmer, mechanic, merchant, professional, 
and laborer touch elbows while under the 
wholesome instruction of sane teachers. 
Thus the real college develops that spirit of 
toleration for the views of others, that gen- 
erous respect for all honest vocations, that 
broad sympathy for all conditions of men, 
and that unstinted love for all the race 
which is the chief hope of the republic. 

Even under the most favorable condi- 
tions the democratic spirit is not easily prop- 
agated, for a study of the civilization proc- 
esses justifies the question raised but re- 
cently by a distinguished editorial writer, 
^^ whether, contrary to the historical theory, 
democracy is not an acquired taste and 
snobbery the natural instinct of man.'' The 
real college may easily become unreal. Un- 
der improper direction, or from lack of di- 
rection, on the part of those charged with 
the responsibility of maintaining its ideals, 
the student body and faculty readily drift 
into exaggerated notions of their own supe- 
riority, and their academic community is 
soon a small aggregation of useless and in- 

102 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

sufferable egotists. Students readily form 
themselves, even in the smallest of colleges, 
into cliques of various sorts, and these, un- 
checked in the inclination to establish false 
notions of merit, ultimately drive out and 
effectively keep away those who can not or 
will not drop naturally into one of these sets. 
Thus the college, instead of continuing to 
be the fallow ground of a healthy democ- 
racy, becomes the fecund soil for the germi- 
nation of a spindling aristocracy. 

For years a war of words has been rag- 
ing about the American college fraternity 
system as a question of dispute among those 
who are jealous for the best interests of the 
real college — and the battle is still on. 
Whether we like it or not, the fraternity as 
an institution of college life has existed for 
more than a century and, with its extensive 
chapter houses and libraries and great con- 
ventions, its catalogues and periodicals, with 
ramifications reaching out among thousands 
of loyal alumni from the humblest walks of 
life up to those whose literary fame or 
political glory has not operated to destroy 

103 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

the love of their college fraternity, it is 
here to stay. 

That evils may follow in its wake is none 
the less true of a college Greek letter fra- 
ternity than of any other human organiza- 
tion. Its opponents, however, are all on the 
outside, and if they could but know how ut- 
terly harmless the average college fraternity 
really is they would vote themselves worthy 
of admission to the grade of laughing-stock. 
It will be conceded that any organized group 
composed of maturing men, without sug- 
gestion or direction from interested elders, 
may easily degenerate into a hateful and 
useless clique of intolerable snobs. Worse 
than that, an undirected or misdirected or- 
ganization of this sort may become a hot- 
house for intellectual dissipation and gross 
misconduct. 

The modern fraternity house, inhabited 
altogether by young men, and servants de- 
pendent upon these young men for their 
hire, is a standing invitation to indolence, 
inordinate pleasure, roughness, and vul- 
garity. It will hardly be denied that the 

104 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

absence of woman's restraining influence, in 
addition to the lack of respected authority 
exerted by an older man, will induce degrad- 
ing action in the unbridled younger spirits 
who reign supreme in a house they call their 
own. The youth who leaves the parental 
roof-tree for college halls with some sense 
of the proprieties instilled, with delicate but 
not prudish conception of the sacred right 
of personal privacy, and with some notions 
of manly refinement, may be shocked at 
first with what he sees in the house of the 
fraternity with which he has cast his lot. 
A young man, though, is very strong at 
eighteen or nineteen years of age, who does 
not sooner or later become spiritually in- 
fected by the frequent hearing of the pro- 
fane oath, the filthy word, and the salacious 
story. He is extraordinarily impervious to 
impressions if he does not lose his respect 
for privacy as he looks upon his brothers 
running about the hall or appearing in the 
parlor scantily clad or entirely unclothed. 

It is hard for any chap with music in 
his soul to resist the temptation to leave 

105 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

his studies when the guitars and mandolins 
are thrumming or when the piano is gallop- 
ing away in the lead of a rollicking song. 
Many fathers and mothers would never send 
their sons to college if the veil could be 
lifted to them for an advance view of the 
orgies about the gaming table and the foam- 
ing beer schooner of the fraternity house. 
The conspiracy of falsehood to shield a sin- 
ning fraternity brother or to cover the com- 
bined misconduct of several or all, the plot of 
politics to secure preferment by fair or unfair 
method, without regard to merit, make the 
Greek letter society in some colleges a curse 
and not a blessing. Bad as all these evils 
may be, however, the most serious handi- 
cap to any institution of learning, in the ex- 
tent of its influence as a healthful factor 
in modern society, is that put upon it by 
student organizations whose members have 
built about themselves walls of exclusive- 
ness on foundations of groundless belief in 
their own inalienable importance. 

Pride of an institution in its own off- 
spring would forbid the writer, if he were 

106 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

otherwise disposed, the privilege of an nn- 
qnalified condemnation of college frater- 
nities/ 

These evils arising from fraternity life, 
when they are fonnd, do not exist because 
the organization is a Greek letter society. 
Given similar conditions, and they are fonnd 
in the clnbs and social organizations of 
those institutions which forbid to their stu- 
dents membership in fraternities. Indeed, 
the clubs of the anti-fraternity colleges are 
often worse in their immorality because their 
organizations are purely local. They have 
no feeling of responsibility for their actions 
nor pride in maintaining the good name of 
a great national body of which they are a 
part, such as the national fraternities have. 

Under proper direction the fraternities, 
clubs, or societies may fix the standards of 
college life and be a democratizing force in 
academic activities. 

1 Three of the great Greek Letter fraternities, Beta Theta 
Pi, Phi Delta Theta, and Sigma Chi were born at Miami Univer- 
sity. The second chapter of Alpha Delta Phi was also estab- 
lished here, as well as one of the earlier chapters of Delta 
Kappa Epsilon. 

107 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

In the case of the great national fra- 
ternities it is true, in nearly every college, 
that the faculty is represented by the mem- 
bership of one or more of its body in every 
fraternity in the institution. In the national 
Greek letter fraternities it is ^^once a mem- 
ber, always a member,'' and any fraternity 
takes pride in pointing to the fact that this 
faculty member or that is a member of 
their brotherhood. 

The college professor has the privilege 
of going to the chapter house or of attend- 
ing the meetings of his fraternity whenever 
he chooses to do so, and, better than that, 
he is always received with open arms and 
the grip of welcome by the students of the 
chapter. In the real college the professor 
alive to the possibilities of this close, per- 
sonal contact, while not assuming to dictate, 
will lead, by their own consent, the student 
members of his fraternity in the establish- 
ment of standards of intellectual and moral 
excellence that will guarantee to them their 
own self-respect while they win the respect 
of others. The alumni of a fraternity are 

108 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

always an asset of pride, and the active 
members, anxious for the support of those 
who have gone ont in other years, will yield 
ready acquiescence to the suggestions of their 
graduates as to the ideals they should seek to 
realize for themselves. Faculty members and 
alumni, co-operating with young men who are 
anxious to do right when they are shown the 
way, may make the fraternity a potent fac- 
tor in all that is best in college life. No 
one interested in the future of the republic 
would want to extract one drop of good red 
blood from the veins of the husky collegian. 
In fact, the man or woman so straight-laced 
that he can not see the possibilities of vig- 
orous, joyous youthhood, and who would 
forbid to the students the happiness that is 
found in true college spirit, is an enemy to 
modern civilization, fit to be relegated to the 
gallery of the antiquities. That the college 
fraternity does raise the standard of mo- 
rality, maintain the scholarship of its mem- 
bers, and encourage democracy in many col- 
leges, is confirmed by the testimony of those 
who know. There are colleges in America 

109 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

where fraternity prayer-meetings and cir- 
cles for Bible study flonrish, and the mem- 
bers of the fraternities where these things 
obtain are not, in the parlance of the campus, 
college ^^ sissies'^ — they are wide-awake, 
manly young fellows, taking a serious view 
of life while they bubble over with good 
cheer. 

There is a chapter of a great national 
fraternity in a typical real college, whose 
members are among the finest and most 
highly respected students of the institution, 
and they will not allow any false notions of 
fraternity and fraternal obligations to take 
root. These say to their new members: 
' ' Call on us for help and sympathy whenever 
needed. We will support you against injus- 
tice. If you go wrong we may forgive you 
the first time, perhaps the second time, and 
help you to your feet ; but if you persist and 
become chronic in your wrongdoing, we 
shall not enter into any conspiracy of false- 
hood or deception to shield you from the 
penalties you should suffer at the hands of 
the authorities for violence to the standards 

110 



STUDENTS OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

of the college. More than that, we shall co- 
operate with the faculties in meting ont jus- 
tice to yon/' This same fraternity has one 
of its npper-classmen, whose regularly ap- 
pointed duty it is to call once a month upon 
the registrar of the college for reports of the 
work being done in the classroom by all the 
members of the fraternity. This report is 
carried to the next meeting of the chapter, 
and the delinquents are exhorted, for their 
own sakes as well as for the sake of the fra- 
ternity and the institution, to devote them- 
selves more assiduously to the preparation 
of their lessons. The members of this frater- 
nity are leaders in athletics, debate, and in 
the activities of the Young Men's Christian 
Association. They stand high in a social way 
and know how to appear as gentlemen at re- 
ceptions and other formal functions. Some 
of the members of this fraternity are from 
homes of wealth, some are of moderate 
means, a few are poor, and one of the last- 
mentioned class, a most highly respected 
young man, fires the furnace and acts as 
house janitor to defray his expenses in col- 
Ill 



THE REAL COLLEGE 

lege. The composite of wealth, moderate 
means, poverty, and character cemented to- 
gether in indissoluble nnion in this frater- 
nity gives the everlasting lie to the oft-re- 
peated and unsupported statement that the 
college fraternity is always and necessarily 
undemocratic and a hotbed of iniquity. In 
the real college the fraternities do not form 
a caste, but are simply a group of congenial 
spirits, true to certain obligations, but rec- 
ognizing that the college, and not the fra- 
ternity, should be the chief object of their 
affection. The men of the fraternities by 
the mechanism of organization may fix 
standards of conduct and scholarship which 
will control the student body, and meeting 
the humblest non-fraternity man, not in a 
patronizing way, as an inferior, but cor- 
dially, as a worthy fellow, the elective of- 
fices of the student body will go to those 
pre-eminently qualified, without regard to 
affiliations. Thus, in the real college, there 
may arise and flourish a real democracy. 

The fullest measure of self-government, 
consistent with the security of society, is 

112 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

always desirable among men. If students 
in days of preparation for the obligations of 
the great outside world are encouraged to 
establish for themselves an ethical system 
which holds them constant in their efforts to 
regard the rights of their fellow-men, to be 
loyal to the State, to fulfill their duties to 
God, and to be true to themselves, collegians 
may prove to be the little leaven that, 
thrown into society, will so leaven the whole 
lump of our civilization as to emphasize the 
insanity of anarchy and make all the re- 
quirements of the law an unnecessary arti- 
ficiality. To this end the real college should 
grow to the fullest possible extent a system 
of student government such as is well exem- 
plified at Bowdoin College. The beginning 
of this self-dependence is found always in 
the classroom where the college professor of 
large vision encourages the student at the 
outset to develop his powers of individual 
initiative. The old-fashioned college pro- 
fessor was unwilling to grant the student 
an opinion of his own worthy of considera- 
tion, but insisted that it was the prerogative 
8 113 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

of the teacher to do all the thinking. The 
student in our real college is allowed opin- 
ions of his own in the classroom, provided 
only that they are presented with due re- 
spect. The old-style literary or debating 
society, with its governance in the hands of 
the students, with its orations, essays, im- 
promptus, debates and drill in parliamen- 
tary practice, is an invaluable aid to inde- 
pendent thought. The Honorable Whitelaw 
Eeid, our ambassador to the Court of Saint 
James, has declared in the later years of 
his life that among the strongest agencies 
in developing his power of independent 
thought and expression while a student at 
Miami University, was a debate extending 
through several weeks to determine whether 
or not a new carpet should be purchased 
for the hall of the Erodelphian Literary So- 
ciety. 

Independent thinking, within due bounds, 
is necessary to independent action in the 
ordering of a life. In the desire to develop 
a stalwart character by the encouragement 
of independence, there are colleges that 

114 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

have fallen into the error of turning the en- 
tire government over to students. It is no 
wonder that these ill-considered experiments 
have often proven disastrous and, far from 
bringing about the desired* order, have pro- 
duced the chaos of misrule. To assume 
that the average youth in his minority has 
developed the judgment necessary to take 
upon himself the entire responsibility for 
devising alone, or in concert with others of 
his kind, a system of satisfactory govern- 
ment, is to assume a maturity which expe- 
rience tells us minors do not possess. The 
Bowdoin system of self-government is an 
evolution. It does not spring into existence 
full-grown. It is the outgrowth of years of 
careful experiment. Where Bowdoin has 
succeeded gloriously, others have made in- 
glorious failure. The parent sending his 
son to college has the right to expect that 
he will be guided gently if possible, but 
firmly if need be, in the establishment of his 
ideals. Left absolutely to themselves in 
government, young men easily confuse lib- 
erty with license, and instead of develop- 

115 



THE REAL COLLEGE 

ing the self-restraint essential to their own 
good and that of society, they throw off all 
restraint, thus weakening themselves, while 
they become the terror of orderly society. 
The real college recognizes that students 
are best governed by the standards that are 
placed before them by those in authority. 
If good ideals are skillfully presented they 
appeal to the student, and he yields that 
ready response which makes the self-gov- 
ernment system a government not of com- 
pulsion but of cheerful consent. The ma- 
turing man makes the first step toward self- 
government — and it is a step that can not 
be missed — when he yields consent of his 
will to be led by those in whom he has con- 
fidence. Led thus and encouraged to de- 
velop his own power of initiative, the youth 
will prepare himself in a normal way to take 
upon himself in due season the responsibil- 
ities of self-government. The sanest college 
government is a government of co-operation. 
When the spirit of an institution is 
healthful the students yield ready acqui- 
escence to its ideals. The infamous pranks 

116 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

of a generation agone no longer have a 
place in the plans of the collegian. There 
is in every sound young man a surplus of 
animal spirit, and if this does not exhaust 
itself properly under direction, it will pass 
off improperly without direction. A safety- 
valve is as necessary to a young man as 
to a steam engine. The modem class-rush, 
which some souls who seem never to have 
enjoyed any youth for themselves in younger 
years view with unspeakable horror, if prop- 
erly conducted is not only a fine antidote 
for the old wickedness of hazing, but it fur- 
nishes, as well, a healthful outlet for super- 
fluous energy. The system of modern ath- 
letics, too, is a most valuable and highly 
acceptable substitute for the lawless van- 
dalism of former years. The stealing of 
the college bell, disfiguring buildings, pollut- 
ing wells, placing live-stock in classrooms 
and agricultural implements on the tops of 
buildings, shaving the tail of the president's 
horse, and other barbarisms, exist only in 
a few so-called colleges whose management 
has not awakened to the dawn of the twen- 

117 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

tieth century. Even in the real college there 
is now and then a sporadic case of ontre 
misconduct, but it is usually condemned by 
the rank and file of the students. If the 
story papers would cease to print the tales 
of daring pranks never played, and if alumni 
who graduated in a day when a great gulf 
was fixed between faculty and students would 
forget to recount at Commencement seasons 
and banquets the embellished tales of the 
barbarous days when they were students, 
the little remaining tendency to senseless 
and criminal prankishness would speedily 
vanish and the day of entire student self- 
government would be hastened. It is alarm- 
ing to discover how fertile in imagination 
even the judicial mind may prove itself to 
be in a recital of college capers. The writer 
has heard in three different colleges from 
staid men whose reputations for sobriety 
and honesty at home is unimpeachable, re- 
count the story of dragging away the presi- 
dent's buggy from his carriage house to an 
obscure point miles away, and when about 
to take their departure the students were 

118 



STUDENTS OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

chagrined to hear the president call out in 
stentorian tones from beneath the robes in 
which he was bundled within the conveyance, 
ordering the boys to haul him back home. 
Stranger than all else in every one of these 
instances the teller of this thrilling tale has 
solemnly declared at the wind-up that he 
himself was the leading participant in the 
prank and its humiliating denouement. 

The students of the real college, studied 
by their teachers as individuals, and encour- 
aged to find themselves, will profit by every 
experience of academic life. The work of 
the classroom is important, but the activities 
of the athletic field, the social life, the dia- 
mond-cut-diamond process that prevails in 
the workshop of the college lapidary, are in- 
valuable and peculiar privileges enjoyed by 
the college man. Standards of scholarship 
are indispensable. No institution can af- 
ford, as a general practice, to allow its good 
name to be jeopardized by passing through 
its course those students who do not meet 
its requirements. A sharp distinction is 
drawn, however, by the faculty of the real 

119 



THE REAL COLLEGE 

college between the criminal idler and the 
earnest student slow to learn. It has often 
happened that a young man apparently- 
stupid in the work of the classroom, but 
otherwise a person of fine possibilities, has 
appeared as a student in college. The proper 
encouragement of such an one by those 
charged with responsibility may never make 
of that young man a brilliant student, but 
if he is able to win a bare passing credit 
in his classes he may become influential on 
the campus, and because of strength in other 
lines and the saturation of his own life in 
the college atmosphere he may become a 
typical college man and in later years a 
credit, if not an honor, to his Alma Mater. 
The students of the real college find 
themselves inspired by the uplift of glori- 
ous traditions, but living always in close 
touch with scholarly teachers who are in 
sympathy with the spirit of modern thought 
and progress, they are unhampered in real- 
izing the best that the latest discovery has 
to offer to young souls ambitious for suc- 
cessful service. 

120 



THE FACULTY OF THE REAL 
COLLEGE 



THE FACULTY OF THE REAL 
COLLEGE 

The reading world is familiar with the 
statement of President Garfield concerning 
Mark Hopkins, a log and himself, so often 
quoted that it has become hackneyed. The 
underlying truth of this oft-repeated senti- 
ment accounts for its persistence. A beauti- 
ful fact as firmly established as the power 
of a respected teacher to mold the life of 
the one he teaches, can never grow too old 
for the emphasis of repetition. 

The impress of the college professor 
upon students is expressed by them in their 
academic community and is productive of 
that intangible yet indispensable something 
we call the spirit of the institution. More 
than that, it is upon the professors of the 
college, taken together in that collective 
group commonly called the faculty, that the 
reputation of the institution largely depends. 

It is something more than a matter for 
123 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

the present moment whether the educational 
staff of a given college is ordinary or ex- 
traordinary. A passable scholarship and the 
fairly good instruction of a particular teach- 
ing corps may be of some immediate value 
to students because of the fine character and 
lofty moral conceptions of the individuals 
composing it, but this is not sufficient. Every 
graduate of an institution is limited in the 
respect accorded him for his education by 
the reputation of his Alma Mater established 
by those who teach or those who have taught 
therein. The standing of every alumnus is 
enhanced through the years with every ad- 
vance movement of his college secured by 
the added regard for the achievement of its 
faculty in the realm of the humanities or in 
the field of science. Comprehensively de- 
scribed, the faculty of the real college is 
composed of virile men, tactful, apt to teach, 
able to inspire the confidence of youthhood 
by their learning, their enthusiasm, anil 
their lofty moral conceptions, and competent 
to command respect for their scholarship in 
the world of letters. 

124 



FACULTY OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

An analysis of facnlty obligations in- 
volves first a consideration of the relation 
of facnlty members to the president of the 
college. That the responsibilities of the 
president and his colleagues are at once 
similar and distinct will hardly be ques- 
tioned. If the administrative work of the 
real college is even approximately successful 
it will be because the duties of the president 
are shared by his associates. According to 
generally accepted precedent in American 
colleges an election to a chair means more 
than a call to the work immediately con- 
nected with a certain line of specialized in- 
struction in the institution. The professor 
who accepts such an election should under- 
stand that his acceptance involves the best 
service he can render from his own chair, 
plus a large activity beyond the narrow 
limits of his own special field, which will con- 
tribute to the general welfare of the insti- 
tution. He will understand that he is ex- 
pected, as a matter of course, without ex- 
plicit contractual stipulations, to attend all 
faculty meetings in which he may hold mem- 

125 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

bership, that he is to participate in the de- 
liberations of the faculty, and that he is to 
assume cheerfully the work of all the com- 
mittees to which he may be assigned. 

In every student body there are some 
restless spirits who will not respond to the 
appeals that are made to manhood, and, re- 
fusing to be controlled by modern methods, 
they must needs be dealt with in harsher 
manner. The problem of discipline in the 
real college will never entirely disappear so 
long as the coming man traces his lineage 
from Adam. It is a weak academic govern- 
ment that runs to the extreme of culpable 
laxity on the one hand or to undue severity 
on the other. If the college is to produce 
men, students inspired by the consciousness 
of their own capabilities revealed to them 
by skillful teaching will, as a rule, recog- 
nize and utilize their power of initiative in 
work and in character building. Knowing 
that the highest type of manhood is devel- 
oped as the result of an awakening of this 
consciousness, college authorities anxious for 
the best permanent results will keep the goad 

126 



FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

out of sight, the emblems of authority hid- 
den, and penalties in the background. But 
to bury beyond the possibility of resurrec- 
tion the ^'thou shalt" and the 'Hhou shalt 
not,'^ which every man must ultimately 
learn — if he has not learned it by the telling 
— by bitter experience, is to place the stamp 
of criminal impotency upon college govern- 
ment in the making of men. Faculty mem- 
bers will assume, without shirking, their un- 
pleasant parts in bearing the burden of col- 
lege discipline. 

The curriculum, the library, the campus, 
the athletic field, the buildings, the equip- 
ment, and the organizations of the college 
are all so vital to the effectiveness of the 
college that the members of the educational 
staff can hardly escape sharing with the 
president an interest in each and all of them. 

No one will question the right of faculty 
members to advise the president. Indeed, if 
he is as wise as such an official should be, 
he will seek the counsel of his associates, and 
knowing that ^4n the multitude of counsel- 
ors there is safety,'' he will be ready to 

127 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

modify his plans and policies after hearing 
from his colleagues. The right to advise 
does not, however, include within it the pre- 
rogative of censorious criticism. Next to a 
despotic egotist in the presidency the most 
obstructive hindrance to the growth of a 
healthful spirit in a given college is a coterie 
of professors painfully sycophantic in the 
presence of their lord and master, and bit- 
terly denunciatory of him when left to them- 
selves. It is difficult to conceive of a more 
painful caricature on true manliness than 
that made up by a little professorial group 
gathered together in a darkened corridor or 
behind a building, gesticulating wildly 
against the administration, unless it be the 
same small crowd in the study of one of the 
number, or in a clubroom planning surrep- 
titiously for the overthrow of their chief. 

The president of one of the larger State 
universities of the Central West was appar- 
ently highly esteemed by all those who 
served with him, but when he resigned, a 
prominent professor, too cowardly to be 
other than obsequious while he thought the 

128 



FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

tenure of the president permanent, re- 
marked, ^^Well, there is certainly a great 
ground-swell of relief among the faculty now 
that we are to be relieved of the incubus of 
this administration.'' Such reprehensible 
hypocrisy, nourished by those who teach, 
can not but exert a blighting influence, even 
though it be unconscious, upon the life of 
the institution as a whole. 

An American college without a respon- 
sible head — let it be repeated — be he known 
as chancellor, president, or by any title what- 
soever, is like a ship without a pilot. The 
crew is indispensable, but let them work 
never so unceasingly and unselfishly, ship- 
wreck will inevitably come if there be no one 
at the wheel. It is true that an unskilled 
or headstrong helmsman may run the vessel 
on rocks or sandbar. In a recent contribu- 
tion to Science under the caption, ^^The 
Ideal University Administration," Profes- 
sor Kent, of Syracuse University, introduces 
his article by saying : 

^^The recent controversy in Syracuse Uni- 
versity is one that is of far more impor- 
9 129 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

tance to the educational interests of the coun- 
try than a mere quarrel between two indi- 
viduals. It is a symptom of disease which, 
to some extent, is common in many univer- 
sities ; that is, the government of a university 
by a single autocrat, supported in power by 
a body of absent trustees who are not edu- 
cational experts. The time is ripe for a gen- 
eral study of university administration. '' 

With no more than this broad hint as to 
recent troubles at home, the author branches 
out into a presentation of his own notions 
as to the ideal university and its govern- 
ment. After a somewhat vague elaboration 
of his theories he concludes his article with 
the categorical assertion that ^^ under such 
a government strong men could be secured 
to fill the professors' chairs; they would be 
secure in their positions as long as they did 
their duty, and such a disgraceful proceed- 
ing as the one that has just taken place at 
Syracuse would be impossible. '^ 

Without any attempt to analyze in detail 
the motives that have prompted this article, 
let it be said, in passing, that it is impos- 

130 



FACULTY OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

sible to escape the conviction that the ani- 
mus of the argument in the body of the pro- 
duction seems to be revealed in the caustic 
reference to unpleasant conditions at home 
in opening, and in the bitter allusion to the 
local troubles in concluding. 

In-so-far as Dean Kent seeks to establish 
general principles that shall govern insti- 
tutions other than his own, his theory of 
university administration is worthy of se- 
rious study. What he has to say of univer- 
sity government is equally applicable to the 
government of a college. He has given ex- 
pression to a feeling of unrest that is dis- 
turbing the peace of mind of more than one 
college professor in America to-day. In 
common with many of his kind, he is crying 
out for emancipation from a tyranny that 
is becoming too common. He wants the 
freedom that numerous other college pro- 
fessors feel to be their indisputable right. 
The incompleteness of his premises, how- 
ever, makes acceptance of his conclusions 
impossible. After defining a university as a 
^^congregation of students and teachers," he 

131 



• THE EEAL COLLEGE 

limits the constitution of a university in its 
origin to one of three methods, namely: 

(1) A body of students of legal age estab- 
lishing a corporation, hiring their own teach- 
ers, framing a set of by-laws and erecting 
and furnishing buildings and equipment; 

(2) a body composed exclusively of teachers 
forming an organization, electing themselves 
as officers, issuing stock, renting or erecting 
buildings and furnishing them, and adver- 
tising for students; or (3) a single rich man 
furnishing money, forming a corporation 
with four dummy stockholders, giving them 
one share of stock each, erecting buildings, 
providing the necessary equipment, hiring 
teachers, advertising for students, and be- 
ginning the business of furnishing educa- 
tion for tuition fees. 

To attempt to restrict a college or uni- 
versity to one of these three foundations 
named by Professor Kent is to run counter 
to the facts of history in American academic 
establishment. It is to reduce higher edu- 
cation in our country to the level of a mere 
socialistic organization or a mercenary com- 

132 



FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

mercial enterprise. As a matter of fact, it 
is well known that there are no colleges or 
universities of note in the New World formed 
altogether by students. The work of higher 
education this side the sea has not to any 
successful degree been a mere money-making 
business. To be sure, in a few instances 
bodies of teachers have associated them- 
selves together to form so-called normal 
schools, and for a little time, by advertising 
their ^^get educated quick'' schemes, they 
have been successful in duping hundreds of 
unsophisticated youth into seeking educa- 
tional advantages where they were not to 
be found. 

It has often happened, too, particularly 
in the far West, that a railroad company 
or a real estate corporation, to increase 
travel or to develop a town site, has estab- 
lished a so-called college to help on the sale 
of building lots. There have been a few 
scattered attempts by single individuals to 
found institutions of learning for personal 
financial profit. None of these ventures by 
teachers, by land agents, or individual spec- 

133 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

nlators have, however, been regarded by the 
public in general as serious educational ef- 
forts, and certainly the institutions they 
have founded have led, in nearly every case, 
so precarious an existence and have been of 
such doubtful value that those engaged in 
real college and university work have never 
recognized them. 

The real college in America is not a 
money-making institution. It is, from the 
standpoint of immediate returns in dollars 
and cents, a money-losing project. Schools 
of higher learning, of the best type, to-day 
are charitable institutions. They have not 
originated in any one of these three ways 
suggested by Professor Kent as essential to 
the formation of a university. The colleges 
of our land are the outgrowth of a com- 
mendable and unselfish paternalism. The 
Church at great sacrifice has established and 
maintained many of the best of them. The 
States have realized the responsibility rest- 
ing upon government for the proper train- 
ing of the sovereign people who compose a 
democratic government and have subsidized 

134 



FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

with, public funds colleges and universities 
which challenge the respect of the world. It 
is true that Church colleges have received 
in some cases large benefactions from men 
of wealth, but no man has ever made large 
gifts to any such institution expecting that 
he would receive the same sort of return 
thereon that would be his by investment in 
^^Standard OiP' or ^^SteeP' stock. In this 
latter day it is true that many institutions 
of learning, denominational in origin and, at 
times in their existence strongly sectarian, 
are breaking away in greater or lesser meas- 
ure from the dependence upon Church sup- 
port. As a strong body of loyal alumni 
grows up about a particular institution the 
Church is relieved from the obligation of 
maintenance and the devoted graduates as- 
sume the responsibility for support. Even 
State supported institutions after some years 
of existence come to look to former students 
for sympathetic help as a necessity. While 
such schools never get beyond the necessity 
of State appropriations, yet former students 
and graduates are their most valuable as- 

135 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

sets. It is upon those they have taught that 
State colleges and universities must depend 
for influence in securing needed govern- 
mental help, and such institutions in many 
instances are not opposed to supplementing 
the support received through public taxation 
with individual gifts from loving sons and 
patriotic friends. Church colleges share the 
support they receive from members of the 
Church with their graduates. The alumni 
of State institutions join with the citizens 
of the State at large in justly claiming the 
rights of partners in the ownership of their 
Alma Mater. It is clear, then, that the re- 
sponsibility of professors in standard col- 
leges and universities is not to themselves 
and their students alone. It is to the Church 
in some cases. In other instances it is to the 
Church and its graduates and the State. In 
all cases it is to the public at large. No col- 
lege worthy of the name could exist with- 
out a paternalistic prop outside of itself. 
Colleges and universities are institutions for 
public service. It is unthinkable in this 
country, at any rate, that the right of direc- 

136 



FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

tion lies altogether with those resident in 
the academic commnnity, as Professor Kent 
maintains. As well absolve the pastor of a 
flock or the governor of the commonwealth 
from all responsibility for official conduct to 
any one but himself, as to claim freedom 
from responsibility for educational policies 
and efficiency to those living beyond the 
boundaries of the campus. 

In further elaboration of his ^^ Ideal Uni- 
versity Administration'' the author named 
declares that ''the best system for a univer- 
sity is neither the boss nor the czar system; 
not mob rule, but a carefully planned system 
of representative government, of which the 
United States is a model.'' He further rec- 
ommends a university senate or council, and 
rather grudgingly concedes that there may 
be a president or chancellor elected by the 
trustees who is to represent the university 
on all public occasions. ^^If the president 
is a money-getter and an orator," he says, 
^^so much the better; but whatever he is, 
it is not wise to give him autocratic power 
over the faculties, nor over the council." 

137 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

Professor George Malcolm Stratton, of 
Johns Hopkins University, with apparent ab- 
sence of personal pique and with greater dig- 
nity gives expression to the feelings that pos- 
sess many of his contemporaries in American 
universities. His ^ ' Externalism in Ameri- 
can Universities,'^ in The Atlantic Monthly 
of October, 1907, is a strong argument for 
revolution in the American system of college 
government, and his conclusions seem al- 
most incontrovertible. It is unfair to quote 
any portion of this genuine contribution to 
the literature of college idealism as compre- 
hending the whole of his argument. And yet 
it seems possible that he has voiced a well- 
nigh universal professorial opinion in say- 
ing: 

' ' The American university president holds 
a place unique in the history of higher edu- 
cation. He is a ruler responsible to no one 
whom he governs, and he holds for an in- 
definite term the powers of academic life and 
death. Subject to the formal approval of 
the trustees, he selects new members of the 
faculty, promotes, dismisses them. To the 
faculty, it is true, there seems to be left the 

138 



FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

important power to define the requirements 
for admission to the university and to its de- 
grees, and yet these activities are, in a fun- 
damental way, directed by the president, 
since by his word comes growth to this de- 
partment and atrophy to that. And while 
his sway is subject to a constitution, and he 
can not quite justly be called an autocrat, 
nevertheless the charter brings to him, per- 
haps, less serious restrictions than those 
which often, in the larger world, would bind 
men who bear the name of emperor/' 

That the love of power for its own sake 
is more dangerous than the love of money 
for its own sake is an assertion that will 
hardly be questioned. It is utterly repug- 
nant to our national notions of democracy 
to tolerate an arrant bossism even in politi- 
cal affairs. Much more offensive is an im- 
perious dictatorship when it brandishes its 
scepter in the ecclesiastical domain. Most 
unendurable of all is it when it dominates 
an academic community. 

That there are those in the political world 
who give their orders simply for the joy of 
witnessing an abject obedience from cring- 

139 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

ing subjects is a conclusion that seems en- 
tirely warranted by superficial observation. 
There are bishops of the Church who re- 
move and exchange priests and preachers 
and run contrary to the wishes of congrega- 
tions simply, it would seem, to show that 
they can do these things. It must be admit- 
ted that there are also some educational 
autocrats in the land of the living who cher- 
ish their official power as the most priceless 
of all their possessions. At every great edu- 
cational gathering it is possible to hear some 
petty village principal or some vainglori- 
ous city superintendent exalting the perpen- 
dicular personal pronoun as he stands among 
a group of those whom he imagines to be 
his admirers while he explains the skillful 
and effective way he has of using the ax. 
At gatherings of college men one may occa- 
sionally hear a diminutive college president 
with magnified opinions of his own superior 
wisdom boast of his ruthless disregard of 
faculty instructions and tell of his many 
successful feats in administering discipline 
to his recalcitrant colleagues. It is a safe 

140 



FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

statement, however, that the overwhelming 
majority of school superintendents and col- 
lege presidents in the United States are not 
of such sort. 

Most men do not reach positions of col- 
lege authority by a single leap from the 
graduate school. As a rule the college pres- 
ident grows into his larger responsibility. 
A study of the biographies of those engaged 
in the work of higher educational adminis- 
tration in our own country will disclose the 
fact that most of them have taken all the 
intermediate steps and have come up by the 
hard way of earned promotions. Nearly all 
college presidents serve apprenticeships as 
tutors and instructors and find their way to 
the honor of departmental chairs before they 
are drafted for institutional headship. In 
the main, they are men who have been tested 
in the ranks, and the recognition of their 
worth by their associates has won them the 
call to presidential duties. Such men By ex- 
perimental knowledge must, in the nature of 
the case, have large sympathy, not only with 
the members of the student body, but with 

141 



THE REAL COLLEGE 

their subordinates of all grades in tlie fac- 
ulty. 

If here and there a college president for- 
gets his obligations as the servant of all and 
becomes lordly, it does not follow that there 
should be universal abolition of the college 
presidency. Indeed, it is impossible to con- 
ceive of a live college in this country with- 
out a chief official performing functions sim- 
ilar to those we have come to regard as the 
work of a president. The American college 
is entirely different from the European in- 
stitution. Its mission is not narrow, but 
broad. Its responsibility is not to the few 
scholars composing a certain academic com- 
munity, but to the multiplied thousands out- 
side the college halls. In the New World 
the college exists not for the benefit of the 
few favored ones, but for the service of the 
whole race of men. 

It has already been shown that the few 
trials of acephalous college government in 
this country have resulted in confessed fail- 
ure. It has been demonstrated that there 
is necessity for some one very much alive, 

142 



FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

at the head of every public institution, to 
whom the supporting public may look for a 
proper accounting, and he in turn must have 
those accountable to him, that he, with their 
help, may make satisfactory report of insti- 
tutional stewardship to those whom the in- 
stitution exists to serve. 

To declare against centralized authority 
in our colleges is to run counter to the spirit 
of our own times. Finding that multiplica- 
tion of offices has contributed chiefly to the 
building of corrupt political machines but- 
tressed by henchmen who fatten at the ex- 
pense of the people, and that distribution of 
responsibility in municipal affairs has re- 
sulted in a constantly increasing inefficiency 
in public service, many cities are now seek- 
ing to find methods by which authority may 
be concentrated and responsibility located. 
A very careful editorial writer in The Out- 
look has recently said that ^4n spite of the 
natural conservatism of cities the so-called 
^Galveston Plan' of municipal government 
continues to make headway. The plan, it 
will be recalled, is based upon the principle 

143 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

of centralizing power and responsibility. It 
provides for the abolition of the ward alder- 
man and for the concentrating of executive 
and legislative functions in a board of five 
men elected on a general ticket, each of whom 
becomes the head of a department/^ Two 
of the great trans-Mississippi States have 
recently, by legislative enactment, made it 
possible for their cities to adopt a modified 
Galveston plan. ' ^ Fort Worth, Dallas, Hous- 
ton, and El Paso, all inspired by the suc- 
cess of their sister city of the same State, 
have adopted the ^^ Commission Plan'' of 
municipal government. Leavenworth, Des 
Moines, and Cedar Eapids, as the result of 
the adoption of this plan, testify to an in- 
creased efficiency in public service at a 
greatly reduced cost. The rising young city 
of Tulsa, in the State of Oklahoma, is one 
of the latest converts to the centralization 
of accountability provided by the Commis- 
sion System. Such eminent students as Pro- 
fessor Albert Bushnell Hart, of Harvard 
University, and Professor Sparling, of the 
University of Wisconsin, have commended 

144 



FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

the ''Commission Plan" for its simplicity 
and the noteworthy results already attained 
tinder it. It may be well, in passing, to em- 
phasize the fact that these distinguished men 
who place their seal of approval on concen- 
trated authority in municipalities are them- 
selves members of faculties in great univer- 
sities widely separated, but both of which 
are constantly growing in greatness of repu- 
tation and power for service, under authority 
centralized in presidents to whose efficient 
leadership the whole world to-day pays trib- 
ute. Concentration of authority in city, 
State, and national government is recog- 
nized to-day as the one thing to be desired 
above all others for economy and efficiency, 
and it is pertinent to inquire why a simi- 
larly centralized direction would not work to 
greater advantage in college administration 
than the divided responsibility which, in the 
few institutions in which it has been at- 
tempted, has resulted in wretched failure. 

Bearing in mind that the real college is 
not self-supporting, that it is a charitable 
concern existing for the service of the pub- 
10 145 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

lie, is it not reasonable that there should be 
some one to be held directly responsible for 
its success or failure? It is inconceivable 
that, for any ordinary incapability, members 
of a self -constituted faculty would vote to 
put one of their own number out of service. 
There is, at all events, a modicum of human 
nature in college professors. A care for indi- 
vidual interests, if there were no considera- 
tions of fraternal courtesy to govern, would 
certainly encourage a reciprocal indulgence 
of peculiarities and faults, if not a total un- 
fitness, inimical to the best service of the col- 
lege. For the professors, rather than the 
trustees, to elect the president of an educa- 
tional institution, as urged by Professor 
Stratton, would be to provide a still stronger 
protection for professorial inefficiency. Never 
in the history of the world has there lived a 
man who has found his largest incentive to 
endeavor within himself. The best man does 
his best when he is spurred to effort by the 
knowledge that he is accountable for all that 
he does or fails to do to some one else. It is 
to claim the existence of a perfected order 

146 



FACULTY OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

of manhood such as the sun has never shone 
on to maintain that any considerable num- 
ber of human beings will work to their limit 
from love of work. It will be readily granted 
that men do work well because they are in- 
terested in tasks they have set for them- 
selves, but their effectiveness is accentuated 
by knowledge of the fact that they are re- 
sponsible to others as well as to themselves. 
Those who have inside knowledge will admit 
that they have known college professors who 
were insufferably lazy. There are those who 
have won some fame that are prone to rest 
on their laurels. Left to follow their own 
inclinations, these self-satisfied teachers, in- 
stead of bringing to students and the larger 
public the inspiration of a growing life, 
would hand them the husks of a spent glory. 
To do all that we may do, every one of us 
must be kept under the lash. 

A college or university without a central- 
ized control never can be a ^^ union of gifted 
persons working together to increase the 
store of intelligence among men.'^ More 
than that, there never has been a competent 

147 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

academic community working on a purely 
socialistic basis. A president elected by the 
professors and subject to tbeir dismissal 
when a mere majority of them find he will 
not do their bidding would be an impotent 
puppet. 

The same human frailties that are com- 
mon to college professors are also found in 
college presidents. If, though, a man of 
broad vision, of great heart, of scholarly 
perspicacity and successful experience can 
be found — and there are some such — to 
whom the direction of a given college is en- 
trusted, he will accomplish more in com- 
pelling it to become a mighty factor for 
good among men, within a few years, than 
could be accomplished without such cen- 
tralized direction in many decades. A pres- 
ident of this sort, himself goaded to his most 
earnest endeavor by the responsibility he 
owes to the board of trustees, who are his 
employers, and by a constituency who de- 
mands from him results as the price of his 
continuance in office, will gather about him 
as his co-laborers in college work the best 

148 



FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

faculty the funds at his command will allow. 
No one knows better than the wise college 
president that his own fitness for his post 
is best demonstrated by his ability to find 
and keep a strong educational staff. Per- 
manency of tenure is a matter of self-pres- 
ervation and, if for no other reason, demands 
that he hold every professor who proves 
himself worthy. Under such a president ev- 
ery member of the faculty will feel himself 
secure so long as he does his whole duty. 
When he fails in doing his full duty there is 
one in authority who, knowing his own re- 
sponsibility for the efficiency of the college, 
will have the courage to recommend a dis- 
missal, which could not come under a com- 
munistic government. Professional para- 
sites are hostile to college vitality. They 
will not have the chance to sap the life-blood 
of an institution which has a courageous 
president who knows he will be held answer- 
able for institutional impotence, superin- 
duced by premature professorial senility. 
An indolent teacher here and there, dis- 
charged by recommendation of a brave pres- 

149 



THE REAL COLLEGE 

ident, may have a grievance against snch a 
president, but the generations will be debtor 
to him. 

The college executive who wields the ^^big 
stick'' simply to find pleasure in hearing the 
blow fall, will soon be discovered and will 
thereby contribute to his own speedy de- 
thronement. Professors working with the 
average college president will not be re- 
stricted in their freedom. Their counsel will 
be frequently sought by him. They will dare 
to speak their minds frankly to him in the 
privacy of his own office or study and pub- 
licly in committees and faculty meetings. He 
will recognize that a college faculty is a de- 
liberative body, and he will bow to the ex- 
pressed will of the majority on all questions 
that are submitted to them as their guaran- 
teed right to decide. He will reserve to 
himself only such plenary authority as is 
necessary to establish and maintain policies 
for which he is, in the main, held responsi- 
ble. Showing himself fraternal and sympa- 
thetic to his colleagues, he will be supported 
by them when it is necessary for him, in the 

150 



FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

interest of the institution, to take extreme 
action. He will be their advocate and de- 
fender in every just cause. The ideal col- 
lege government consists of a capable, fear- 
less president on the one hand, and on the 
other it is a scholarly, public-spirited faculty, 
both working in sympathetic co-operation as 
servants of humanity. It is because we have 
many such ideal systems of academic govern- 
ment that the American college is to-day the 
best the world has ever known. 

But members of a college faculty are re- 
lated to each other in a way vital to the wel- 
fare of themselves and their institution. I 
have heard of bitterly opposing factions in 
college-governing bodies, but I have never 
known of an institution in which such a state 
of affairs had actual existence. It is always 
possible to hear of an institution where there 
is lack of harmony, but the institution is al- 
ways in some other town, city, or State. It 
is safe to affirm that a college faculty rent 
with internal dissensions could have no par- 
allel in misery outside the hateful jealousies 
that make for perpetual woe in an Oriental 

151 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

harem. College professors are members of 
an educational family, and the respect and 
consideration shown for one another and for 
all will not only contribute to individual hap- 
piness and effectiveness, but to the esteem 
in which all teachers are held by those who 
are taught. Nothing is more desirable in 
the college world than the inculcation in stu- 
dents of a high regard for the manliness 
of scholarship; and when faculty colleagues 
invariably speak well of each other and show 
genuine appreciation of the character and 
achievements of their associates, they fix a 
lofty ideal of learning in the minds of their 
student constituency. The real college is a 
republic of letters, where every member 
gives himself, without stint, in earnest co- 
operation to the cultivation of a public sen- 
timent healthful to noble character and gen- 
uine scholarship, and the American college 
is preponderantly of this splendid type. 

If the terms college and university in this 
discussion have been used interchangeably 
and synonymously, let it be pleaded in justifi- 
cation therefor that in many respects their 

152 



FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

mission and their functions are identical. In 
respect to these points of similarity a criti- 
cism passed on one would apply with equal 
force to the other. There is a field, though, 
which belongs distinctively to the college, 
and which the university, by reason of its 
very bigness, can not enter. This is the field 
of personal contact of teachers and students, 
which the smallness of the real college per- 
mits it to occupy as its exclusive domain. It 
is, then, in the relations maintained by fac- 
ulty members to their students in the real 
college that their true worth is determined. 
In a recent issue of the New York Even- 
ing Post J under the caption, ^^The College 
Grindstone," a severe indictment is lodged 
against the American college professor. The 
opening statement is the alarmingly em- 
phatic declaration that ^^the recently pub- 
lished ^Life and Letters of Sir Eichard 
Jebb' must fill the occupants of academic 
chairs in America with envious despair.'^ 
With characteristic Anglo-maniacal admira- 
tion, in innnediate succession to the fore- 
going sentence, we are told that ^Hhis pic- 

153 



THE REAL COLLEGE 

tiire of a life of a college professor in 
Great Britain is far different from that of 
a college professor in America/' With 
such premises it is not hard to anticipate 
the conclusion of this arraignment. The 
writer has adopted as his own a common 
error of our own times. He assumes, with 
many others, that the chief business of 
the college professor is that of a producer. 
According to this all too prevalent notion the 
teacher in the modern college who fails to 
contribute to the technical journals of his 
special line or to literature in general is a 
pitiable failure. Apparently the indignation 
of this editorial writer grows by what it feeds 
upon, for, proceeding, he says : 

^^In America this notion of the scholar and 
man of letters combined in one person is but 
dimly conceived by most members of the 
academic body: and it has apparently never 
entered the heads of many college trustees. '' 

He bemoans the fact that, though we have 
had among our college professors a Long- 
fellow and a Lowell, ^'the vast majority can 

154 



FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

hope to be nothing more than competent 
teachers and editors of useful text-books — a 
respectable but not inspiring career.'^ 

^^ Nothing more than competent teach- 
ers !'' Shades of Socrates, Pestalozzi, and 
Arnold of Eugby, what an inpeachment! 
Socrates wrote nothing, but as the teacher 
of Alcibiades and the Athenian youth he 
has lived to a day that reaches centuries 
away from the hemlock cup. Pestalozzi 
wrote '^Leonard and Gertrude, '^ but it re- 
flects his experience gained by eating, drink- 
ing, sleeping, suffering, and rejoicing with 
the little children who loved him as their 
teacher. The intellectual faculties of Doc- 
tor Arnold did not surpass those of many of 
his contemporaries, and in scholarship he 
occupied a subordinate place to many of his 
associates. As has been truly observed, ^^his 
^ Thucydides, ^ his history, his sermons, and 
miscellaneous writings are all proofs of his 
ability and goodness, and yet the story of 
his own life is worth them all.'^ The record 
of his career is a fulfillment of the prophecy, 
*'If elected Master of Eugby, he would 

155 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

change the face of education all through the 
public schools of England/^ It was only a 
few words in the quick-shifting sands, ob- 
literated by the winds before the setting of 
the sun, that were written by Him who 
taught in the unroofed schoolroom of Gali- 
lee, and yet His teachings have transformed 
nations, and the truth He inculcated goes 
marching on against the coming of the day 
of a perfected civilization. 

From the days of Socrates and the Car- 
penter's Son down to the present, in elemen- 
tary school and college, there have been hun- 
dreds of those who have been ^^ nothing more 
than competent teachers,'' whose lives of 
high scholarship, of fine culture, and lofty 
character have contributed, as nothing else 
in the world has done, to the making of use- 
ful and happy lives. To be ^'nothing more 
than competent teachers" will not mean the 
writing of the names of the teachers high on 
the scroll of eternal fame, but it will mean 
more than that; it will mean the writing of 
imperishable principles on the plastic tab- 
lets of youthful character, and these will 

156 



FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEaE 

crystallize into monuments that will outlast 
memorials of bronze and marble, enduring 
in the heaven of heavens forever. 

It should never be forgotten that the best 
product of any school is not a book, but a 
man. It is painful to contemplate the am- 
bition of too many new-fledged doctors of 
philosophy seeking educational positions, 
whose ambition is not to teach but to write. 
Many of them look with contempt on teach- 
ing, while they pine for the honors of author- 
ship. It is beyond the limits of conjecture 
how many good teachers have been spoiled 
by an ambition which has found its fruition 
in an unread literature, but it is a safe prop- 
osition that the dust-covered theses of our 
graduate colleges would make a bonfire of 
very respectable flame. 

There are numbers of those fresh from 
graduate study who, if they can not write, 
will insist upon lecturing. They would feel 
themselves very common to speak of teach- 
ing, so they go not to the classroom but to 
the ^ 4ecture-room. " If the colleges in re- 
cent years have suffered from one thing more 

157 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

than another, it seems probable that it is 
from the attempt to use the methods of the 
graduate school in undergraduate work. It 
should never be forgotten that, according to 
its etymological signification, education 
means a leading forth, or a drawing out, a 
development. The immature mind can not 
be developed by the ^^ pouring in" process. 
Maturing intellectual powers grow by exer- 
cise, and there is no better exercise for the 
youthful mind than the old-fashioned reci- 
tation method. The Socratic system of ques- 
tions and answers amplified in such a way 
as to bring the growing man to his feet to 
show by concise English, in properly related 
sentences, the results of his study, is the 
ideal method. Nothing more vicious in our 
modern educational system has shown itself 
than this stifling of unfolding manhood by 
the so-called ^ lecture plan.'' The real col- 
lege requires its professors, first of all, to 
be teachers. They are teachers by the in- 
spiration of their scholarship and their in- 
sistence upon clearness of understanding 
and accuracy of statement in the classroom. 

158 



FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

Above all, they are teachers in their homes, 
on the campus, and on the streets, by the 
lives they live before their students, whose 
close inspection they can not escape either 
by night or by day. In the real college the 
teacher necessarily lives so close to those he 
teaches that the impress of his character is 
left upon them whether he will or not. The 
educator who aspires to a Bohemian exist- 
ence would do well to find a position in a 
great university, where his unconventional 
manner of living will remain undiscovered, 
rather than in the real college, where he will 
be known and read of all. 

It is inconceivable that one can be the 
right sort of teacher in the real college if 
his daily life is not ordered in accordance 
with the highest standards of morality — is 
it necessary to say Christian morality? 

The vulgar swagger assumed by some 
college and university professors in this lat- 
ter day would be pitiable if it were not posi- 
tively mischievous. Time was when the man 
who taught in college believed that his life 

159 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

should be one of consecration to the highest 
ideals of character. He believed that all 
questionable conduct should be avoided. For 
the sake of his influence upon his students 
he consistently refrained from indulging 
himself in those diversions which to men oc- 
cupying less responsible positions might be 
occasionally allowable if not always per- 
missible. 

It is not an unusual thing in these days 
to see a college professor with a cigar or 
cigarette between his teeth, smoking openly 
before his students. At the banquets attend- 
ant upon educational assemblies and learned 
societies not only is after-dinner smoking 
common, but the wineglass has become indis- 
pensable. In the English universities many 
of the fellows refuse to drink, not from any 
moral compunctions, but because in drink- 
ing they would seem common. There are 
many college teachers in this country who 
do not drink, but it is a sad commentary on 
higher education in America that there are 
so many in positions of educational leader- 
ship who are at utter variance with the spirit 

160 



FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

of an age that, like no other, stands for the 
annihilation of the drink traffic. 

No more hateful spectacle confronts ad- 
vancing civilization than a beer-sipping, 
wine-bibbing, college professor. He is hate- 
ful because he is incongruous. More than 
that, he is hateful because of the havoc he 
works as an iconoclast in the beautiful temple 
of youthful ideals. It is a safe prediction 
that in the near coming day, when the Ameri- 
can saloon is only an historic tradition, the 
college professor who drinks in public or in 
private will not be tolerated beyond the 
meeting of the board of trustees succeeding 
his discovery. 

To be correct in his habits of scholarship 
and in his domestic, religious, political, and 
social life is essential to the highest success 
of the professor in our real college. To be 
aggressive in his attempts to reach his stu- 
dents by a direct influence for good outside 
the classroom is to realize largely on the op- 
portunities for personal contact possible 
only in the real college. 

There is ground for fear that over-much 
11 161 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

anxiety to maintain a high intellectual stand- 
ard in our colleges has led to the pitiless 
crushing of those possessed of great likeli- 
hood for usefulness. If the high-grade col- 
lege has any excuse whatever for its ex- 
istence, it is found in its possibilities for the 
inspiration of individual instruction. It is, 
of course, easiest to require a student to 
come up, with the rest of the class, to a 
certain grade, and if he fails, to refuse him 
permission to return. The highest skill of 
the teacher is shown, however, not in mak- 
ing something out of a genius. He who can 
take the dullard, or the indifferent one, or 
the happy-go-lucky youth, or the unpromis- 
ing one, and fire him with a resolution that 
will lead to achievement, is an artist, and 
the beneficent results of his work will widen 
with the successive generations to the end 
of time. It is only in the real college that 
such accomplishments are possible. 

A recent writer in World^s Work has 
prophesied the coming of a day when we 
shall have in our leading educational insti- 
tutions a Chair of Eugenics. The world of 

162 



FACULTY OF THE REAL COLLEGE 

scholarsliip will extend cordial welcome to 
the coming of the expert who shall teach the 
rising generations how to make future gen- 
erations well bom. After all, though, the 
expert who takes the man already born and 
teaches him how to live is rendering the 
largest service to those that are yet unborn. 
It is proper to indulge the hope that the day 
is not far distant when, in every college, we 
shall have a Professor of Individual Atten- 
tion. This man will have taken his graduate 
study in human temperaments. He will be 
a student of ancestry and prenatal influences. 
He will know what to expect as the product 
of certain environments. He will know how 
to remedy the spiritual and intellectual and 
physical ill-health which is the result of 
previous faulty teaching. He will not only 
be a master of applied psychology, but as 
well of applied physiology. He will make it 
his business when he comes to his college 
chair to provide himself with statistics as to 
every Freshman. He will arm himself with 
facts as to the parents of every new student, 
his former teachers, his habits of life, his 

163 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

inclinations and his tendencies, his likes and 
his dislikes. He will revise these individual 
records as students proceed on their way 
through college. When a student gives his 
first indication of failure he will be referred 
to this Professor of Individual Attention, 
who, knowing more about the youth than the 
youth knows of himself, will approach him 
from the right direction and, instead of al- 
lowing him to be thrown out, he will save 
him to a useful career that will honor his 
Alma Mater. 

There are some living men who in stu- 
dent days were tossed out of college as 
worthless or hopelessly dissolute, who have 
afterward lived useful, successful, and hon- 
orable lives. It has sometimes happened 
that the college which has discarded them 
has later been glad to confer honorary de- 
grees on those who in the critical period of 
their lives it made no serious effort to save. 

After all, though, no Professor of Indi- 
vidual Attention, no number of personal pre- 
ceptors, can do the work of the professors 
who fill the usual college chairs. There is 

164 



FACULTY OF THE EEAL COLLEGE 

no way of escape from responsibility for him 
who teaches any subject. He who is master 
of his particular line of academic specializa- 
tion, who knows his students by name, who 
greets them with a pleasant word, who pos- 
sesses a genuine sympathy for youth, who 
lives an exalted life, and who denies himself 
to go out in aggressive activity for the de- 
velopment of a higher life among those he 
teaches, and whose incentive to labor comes 
as the result of a life itself transformed by 
the spirit of Christ, is the real teacher. He 
will accentuate his influence if he writes 
some books and is known in the great out- 
side world, but he will be loyal to his insti- 
tution, cordially supporting all just author- 
ity, unselfishly co-operating with his col- 
leagues and living every day with a passion 
that finds its gratification in the service of 
humanity. Men of such purposes serving as 
members of the faculty will be powerful in 
the making of the real college. 



165 



THE REAL COLLEGE MAN 



THE REAL COLLEGE MAN* 

The college man is sui generis. Seen 
through the sordid eyes of the man of the 
world, he is a worthless hulk of hopeless 
egotism. He is an object of abuse at the 
hands of porcine men who would refuse to 
exuberant youth a legitimate outlet for sur- 
plus vitality, while they boast themselves 
practical as they fatten at the sour swill- 
trough of dishonest business methods. The 
college man is held up to public ridicule by 
the cheap paragraphist who has failed to 
avail himself of advantages which might 
have lifted him above the level of a tolerated 
nuisance. The vulgar populace, in changing 
mood, makes the student the subject of ma- 
licious criticism or churlish raillery. 

Viewed objectively, our college man is a 
biped with bifurcated hair hanging low on 

* This chapter is a vagrant. It was not written in connection 
with those preceding it in this book. **The Real College Man " 
is an after-dinner address delivered at numerous college ban- 
quets. It is reproduced in this connection because it is a con- 
crete r6suni6 of the purpose of the real college as hereinbefore 
set forth.— G. P. B. 

169 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

either side, leaving only a triangle of ques- 
tionable whiteness above the eyebrows. If 
lie wears a head-covering of any sort above 
this tonsled thicket it is a cap, in color of 
blinding red, or bine, or green, or yellow, 
and of a ^^ Happy Hooligan'' circnmf erence ; 
or, mayhap, it is a flat and well-nigh brimless 
hat with a wide band, fit rival for the coat 
of Joseph, the patriarch. His necktie can be 
heard three squares away. Beneath his vest- 
less coat, his wide expanse of negligee shirt- 
front, displayed on a station platform, would 
prevent a disastrous train-wreck if the block 
should fail to work. His belted and suspen- 
derless trousers are a perpetual source of 
anxiety to friends fearful of his reputation 
for decency. His striped socks, set into the 
latest cut of topless shoes, under turned-up 
pantaloons, complete a picture that make 
the lower extremities a fit termination for 
the spectacular beginning at the top. 

Heard objectively, the college man is a 
creature of abnormal lungs from which come 
forth the bellowings of yellings and the ear- 
splitting notes of rollicking song. 

170 



THE EEAL COLLEGE MAN 

It is this superficially objective present- 
ment that makes the collegian a creature of 
loathing to the womanly man, a public men- 
ace to the omniscient editor, and a thorn in 
the flesh of the petty officer of the peace. 
These irascible individuals, who themselves 
never had any youth or, if they had, buried 
it in oblivion so long ago that it is eternally 
lost to memory, would clothe the college stu- 
dent in creaseless, broad-brimined black hat. 
Prince Albert coat, side-buttoned trousers, 
cloth gaiters, boiled shirt, celluloid collar, 
cambric tie, and a solemn face, and then call 
it a man. God save the mark ! 

There must be something more than this 
objective side to the man who later in life 
finds himself a part of the great body of 
the college-trained that compose sixty-nine 
per cent of the eleven thousand three hun- 
dred and eighty-four people of the nation 
whose names appear in ^^Who 's Who in 
America. ' ' He must be worth something, or 
he would not find his way to leadership in 
the halls of Congress, to the dignity of the 
Supreme Bench, and to the power of the Ex- 

171 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

eciitive Chair. He is more than ordinary, 
or he would not predominate in the field of 
literature, while he leads at the bar, and in 

medicine, and monopolizes the pulpit. Yes, 
cut away the excrescences, plunge the knife 
into the brain, drive it deep into the heart 
of the college student, and you find the nu- 
cleus of a real man. 

The college man is a likable chap. I 
have lived with him so long that I could not 
be happy without him. He makes a sur- 
rounding that preserves the spirit of eter- 
nal youth. It is unthinkable to me that one 
could grow old in living with him. I love 
him because of his possibilities. I would not 
change him one whit. I want him with his 
spirit of joyous optimism. His college yell 
is as the music of the morning to my soul. 
I am willing to take him as he is — thatched 
head, cuffs on trousers, and all. These are 
the outward symbols of an inward enthusi- 
asm that prophesies an aggressive man to 
whom some day this old world will listen. 

Viewed subjectively, for he has his sub- 
jective as well as his objective side, the col- 

172 



THE EEAL COLLEGE MAN 

lege man is an individual of limitless pros- 
pects for usefulness. His possibilities con- 
stitute the measure of his responsibility. 
His opportunities for the development of his 
talents and the growth of a stalwart char- 
acter place within his grasp a life of influ- 
ence that will widen with successive genera- 
tions to the end of time and that will main- 
tain its power through all eternity. 

The real college man is indispensable to 
civilization, but the real college man is pro- 
duced only by the real college. When the 
word ^'college" is mentioned there loom big 
before us thoughts of a beautiful campus, 
groups of buildings, adequate equipment, 
the teaching of the humanities, the arts and 
sciences, scholarly professors, and hurry- 
ing crowds of young people. But all these 
do not make a college. The real college is 
campus, buildings, equipment, courses, teach- 
ers, and students, plus that intangible but 
indispensable something that we call an at- 
mosphere. A proper environment is the 
first condition of a true college atmosphere- 
There must be a real college community. If 

173 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

the institution be located in a great city, 
there must needs be an institutional life- 
center, a college heart. That Columbia Uni- 
versity and The College of the City of New 
York are not types of the real college is due 
to the fact that the students there meet their 
professors only for a brief hour in the lec- 
ture-room and know them only at a distance, 
without themselves being known by those 
who instruct. Students do not even know 
each other except within the limitations of 
their own small circle of intimates in these 
institutions, for when lectures are ended they 
scatter all over that great city, and their 
identity as collegians is hopelessly lost in 
the swirling crowd of commercialism. Is 
it any wonder that Columbia University has 
no football team worthy of the name? For- 
mer President Seth Low may have been 
right when he declared that Columbia Uni- 
versity should develop along the lines of 
least resistance and make of itself a collec- 
tion of graduate and professional colleges, 
leaving the pure college work to be done by 
those institutions located in more secluded 

174 



THE EEAL COLLEGE MAN 

places friendly to the growth of true college 
life. There are institutions, though, in the 
large cities that have demonstrated that a 
college community is possible in a crowded 
center. The University of Chicago is strong 
in its college spirit. The far-seeing vision 
of President Harper, master college builder 
of the world, revealed to him the importance 
of making the university itself the center 
where students would of necessity pass the 
greater part of their time. What has been 
done there can be done in large measure in 
other city colleges. Dormitories, student 
buildings, commons, clubhouses, and fre- 
quent convocations will keep students jos- 
tling against each other, and constantly 
touching elbows with professors in such a 
way that a college consciousness will spring 
into being. It will, of course, be admitted 
that a smaller town which exists primarily 
because of the institution in its midst will 
more easily lend itself to the development 
of a college commimity than a large city. 
It is because of such locations that Yale and 
Dartmouth and Princeton and Michigan are 

175 



THE REAL COLLEGE 

so strong in community life and spirit. And 
yet, in a small city like Ann Arbor, wlien I 
visited there last, three years ago, students 
and faculties were clamoring loudly for a 
student building on the campus, where all 
might come to know each other better and 
cultivate the feeling of college fellowship. 

If it be true that a college community is 
essential, it is equally true that size is an- 
other important factor in producing a col- 
lege atmosphere. A caravansary is hostile 
to good air. Medical colleges, law schools, 
engineering shops, and barns for animal 
husbandry do not make a real college. It 
must be borne in mind that a college is not 
in any sense of the word a technical or a 
professional school. The real college pre- 
sents the humanities, the arts, and the pure 
sciences. It provides the discipline and cul- 
ture which will best fit men to enjoy life 
and that will prepare them for a more in- 
telligent later study in the lines of their 
chosen specialization. In the formative days 
of college life the associations and compan- 
ionships are of no less value than the work 

176 



THE EEAL COLLEGE MAN 

required for gradnation. The college day is 
a care-free period, and the friendships there 
formed and the pleasures there enjoyed 
abide forever as the aroma of fragrant in- 
cense, sweetening life through all the busy 
years that follow. That such a college with 
these glorious associations can exist in a 
large institution is not questioned. It can 
not exist, however, if it be overshadowed by 
the magnified importance of trades-schools 
and graduate colleges round about it. To 
have a real college in a great university, the 
college of liberal arts, though small in its 
student body, should be the nucleus of the 
university life and should be built up by the 
authorities as a necessary stepping-stone to 
the successful later work in the utilitarian 
departments of instruction. It will be ad- 
mitted, though, that the college in isolation 
has less opposition in maintaining its ideals 
and that the purest college atmosphere is at- 
tainable where numbers are not so great as 
to prevent free circulation and easy and con- 
tinuous social intercourse. Five hundred to 
six hundred students are enough to make a 
12 177 



THE REAL COLLEGE 

real college; more than that many would 
stifle the atmosphere. It is this exclusive- 
ness in numbers that has given to Amherst 
and Williams and Bowdoin and Wesleyan 
their distinction. 

The ideals of an institution, too, con- 
tribute in no small measure to the making 
of an atmosphere. The responsibility for 
institutional ideals, in the main, rests on the 
governing body. If the president and fac- 
ulty constitute themselves an oligarchy, seek- 
ing a rule of tyranny, the college air will 
hang heavy in its oppressiveness. A com- 
pany of college students is easily controlled 
when properly directed; it is the easiest 
body in the world to antagonize by improper 
methods. It should be assumed that he who 
is old enough to go to college is old enough 
to be a man. There is no class on earth 
which so quickly and so bitterly resents the 
crack of the whip as that composed of those 
who have but just been emancipated from 
apron-strings. This is as it should be. The 
youth mature enough to leave his mother is 
sufficiently mature to be treated as an adult. 

178 



THE EEAL COLLEGE MAN 

What a wonderful opportunity is open to the 
college president at this critical period! If 
he will but appeal to his students as men, 
they will respond to his appeal. All iiie 
threats and all the dire penalties imposed 
by the college faculties of the olden day did 
not prevent the theft of the bell-clapper, 
the shaving of horses' tails, the pollution of 
wells, the inartistic decoration of buildings, 
the destruction of property, indignities to 
fellow students, and a tone of universal dis- 
respect. In the real college of our modern 
day there is absence of petty rules, and the 
sympathy existing between teachers and 
taught is so pronounced, without sacrifice of 
professorial dignity, that vandalism has be- 
come history, and respect for man and rev- 
erence for God are enthroned in student life. 
The new is everywhere supplanting the old, 
and the real college is an atmosphere where 
the standard of excellence is all-round man- 
hood. 

One thing more is yet needed to produce 
the perfect college atmosphere, and that is 
Tradition. It is worth while to have a his- 

179 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

tory. An institution may have all the other 
requisites, but until it has hoary years re- 
plete with honor behind it, the atmosphere 
will lack the bracing quality that makes 
young blood tingle. The student who has 
found his way to a college atmosphere 
fraught with sacred traditions will be 
spurred to highest endeavor as with "Words- 
worth he reverently declares: ^^I could not 
print ground where the grass had yielded to 
the steps of generations of illustrious men, 
unmoved. I could not always lightly pass 
through the same gateways, sleep where they 
had slept, wake where they had waked, range 
that enclosure old, that garden of great in- 
tellects, undisturbed. ' ' 

The college, then, of comely campus, 
good equipment, rich curricula, competent 
teachers, and wide-awake students, in an at- 
mosphere made redolent by the right envi- 
ronment, the proper numbers, lofty ideals, 
and honorable annals, is the real college, and 
there we shall find the real college man. 

The real college man, breathing such an 
atmosphere as this, is a patriot. He believes 

180 



THE EEAL COLLEGE MAN 

in his institution, he rejoices in its victories, 
and contributes to their multiplication. It 
has always been a mystery to me, and the 
mystery deepens with every added day, why 
it is that certain sanctimonious individuals 
pucker up their sour faces and, if possible, 
look more acetose than common whenever 
their ears are greeted with a college yell. 
There is no music in all the world so sweet 
to me as the yell of my own college coming 
from the lusty lungs of my own students. 
It is the expression of abounding life, of 
healthful youth, of unselfish loyalty. I know 
that every time a boy yells for his college 
he is drawing its colors about him a little 
more securely, and I know, too, that he is 
laying the foundation for that larger patri- 
otism which in later years will accentuate 
his love of country every time he gives a 
cheer for the Stars and Stripes. 

Let that fossil who declaims against foot- 
ball be relegated to the museum of the an- 
tiquities! Let dumbness strike him who 
would use his voice against the songs and 
shouts of joyous college men when they tri- 

181 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

iimpli in oratory or debate! Palsied be the 
arm of the tyrant who wonld reach ont a 
hand to throttle class spirit ! Blinded be the 
eyes of him who will see nothing bnt evil 
in devotion to fraternity! We live in an 
age when gentleness and regard for the 
rights of others are our watchwords of 
progress; bnt to make our civilization all it 
should be, there must be some iron in the 
blood. The real college man is fearless in 
his loyalty to his college, and this fearless 
loyalty is a preparation for the larger pa- 
triotism which will show itself in unflinching 
devotion to righteousness in the service of 
society and the State when maturer years 
have come. 

The real college man is a scholar as well 
as a patriot. Indeed, it is impossible to form 
any conception of loyalty in disassociation 
from obligation. The supreme duty of the 
college man is work. It is the consciousness 
of work faithfully done that makes possible 
the other side of his college life. He who 
permits his college to provide him with a 
disciplined mind and a refined taste is ac- 

182 



THE EEAL COLLEGE MAN 

cepting an equipment that will bring to his 
later years a satisfaction in living amply 
compensating him for the lack of many 
grosser comforts. To be able to think 
clearly and to reason wisely, to possess a 
sane judgment, to have an appreciation of 
the fine things in literature, in art, and in 
history, is to have the joyful consciousness 
of a life that is high above the common-place. 

Last of all, our real college man is a man 
of character. He is plain, unassuming good- 
ness. He has good red blood in his veins, 
but he knows that the greatest triumph pos- 
sible to mortal man is that victory over self 
which subdues the passions, controls appe- 
tite, directs desire, commands reverence, and 
establishes honesty. The real college will 
keep ever before its students for their emu- 
lation the blameless character of Him who 
was both God and man, and seeking to fash- 
ion their ideals after this life, college men 
will be firmly established in every good word 
and work. 

Then, blessings on the college man ! Ma- 
tured in the atmosphere of the real college, 

183 



THE EEAL COLLEGE 

lie is the most hopeful prophecy of our na- 
tional salvation. Let him wash and dress 
and comb as he will! Love him for all that 
he is and for all that he may be. His pa- 
triotism, his scholarship, and his character 
will make him the mightiest potentiality of 
future years in dethroning '^ Graff and in 
crushing Tyranny. He will be the finest ex- 
ponent of public and private honesty in our 
American life, for when cap is discarded, 
when hair is cut, and when trousers are un- 
rolled, we shall find that the real college has 
given to the world a real man. 



184 




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